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City officials agreed to pay $12m to the children of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died when police who encountered him running naked through the snowy streets of Rochester, New York, put him in a hood and held him down until he stopped breathing.
A federal judge approved the settlement in a court document filed on Thursday. The Rochester mayor, Malik D Evans, said in a statement the agreement was “the best decision” for the city.
“It would have cost taxpayers even more to litigate and would have placed a painful toll on our community,” said Evans, who was not in office when Prude died in March 2020.
The settlement money, minus lawyers’ fees and costs, will go to Prude’s five children, attorneys said.
“I think that it’s an amount of money that is sufficient to show that the City of Rochester recognizes that something very bad happened and that it’s very important for the city to put it in the rearview mirror and move forward,” said Matthew Piers, a lawyer for the administrator of the estate.
