“As far as I know,” the chief said.
After a trial of seven days, the jury took three hours to reach a decision. Quick verdicts usually aren’t good for civil plaintiffs, but when the jurors filed back into the courtroom, several made eye contact with Hunter. The judge announced they had found the city had discriminated against him and failed to reasonably accommodate his disability. The jury also rejected the city’s claim that it would have treated Hunter the same way if he hadn’t had PTSD. The jury awarded him $2.6 million for lost salary and emotional distress. (The city has appealed the verdict and declined to comment further, citing the ongoing litigation; the Police Department also declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing litigation.)
Hunter wept. He looked over to the jurors; several of them were crying, too. Jurors typically departed from the back of the courtroom, but because the verdict came late in the day, they were asked to leave through the front with everyone else. One by one they walked past the plaintiff’s table. Each stopped and shook Hunter’s hand.
One of the biggest annual gatherings of law-enforcement officers, National Police Week, begins in Washington on Sunday, May 11. Tens of thousands of officers from across the country attend the week’s most important event, an annual candlelight vigil to honor fallen officers. What qualifies as a “line of duty” death has expanded over the years to include heart attacks, strokes and Covid-19. Many families expected this to be the first year that death by suicide would be included, too.
But in January, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, the nonprofit that oversees the wall, told families that it would not add any suicide deaths this year. Bill Alexander, the chief executive of the organization, told me that the issue has been difficult to navigate. While the wall sits on federal land, it is maintained entirely by donations. Because there isn’t a consensus about how to treat deaths by suicide, the group’s board was concerned about alienating some of its supporters. It also worried about maintaining the integrity of the country’s most important policing monument, Alexander told me, one that embodies the profession’s highest ideals: honor, service and sacrifice. “The board felt a strong moral duty to protect what they view, and what I view, as a very sacred space,” he said.
Last year, the board received nine applications for officers who died by suicide to be considered for the wall. (Morgan’s was not yet one of them.) When a committee began to analyze these cases, many questions arose, Alexander told me. Suicides are as complicated as life itself. There were divorces, childhood traumas, financial problems, affairs, misconduct allegations, depression and other mental-health conditions, some of which predated an officer’s policing career. It was difficult teasing out how much of an officer’s trauma was caused by policing versus life. “It gets surprisingly complicated in ways we had not envisioned,” Alexander said.