The payment would not, however, undo the impunity, lack of accountability and official arrogance exposed by the circumstances of Ghaisar’s death in 2017, which mirror so many instances of police-involved killings across the country.
Ghaisar had no criminal record. He was unarmed and posed no danger. He was pursued by the police following an accident that scarcely warranted a traffic ticket, let alone a pursuit and a hail of bullets: He had stopped his vehicle in a roadway and was rear-ended; little damage was done. The fact that no one has been held to account for his death enshrines a systemic injustice that no amount of money can fix.
In a court filing on Friday, Ghaisar’s parents agreed to the settlement in their wrongful death lawsuit, which awaits final approval from the federal judge overseeing the case. They would receive $3.75 million of the $5 million from the government; their lawyers would get the rest.
And what of the two Park Police officers who shot Ghaisar to death after a chase that began with a fender bender on the George Washington Parkway, just across the Potomac from the nation’s capital? What of their superior officers, or officials in that police department’s parent agency, the U.S. Interior Department?
None has faced a reckoning. None has been compelled to testify in civil or criminal court — or even explain in public what happened, why the officers opened fire, and how their decisions comported, or did not, with department procedures. The officers, Lucas Vinyard and Alejandro Amaya, remain employed in administrative jobs with the Park Police. Nothing has come of the Interior Department’s effort to fire them, begun two years ago. And at pretrial depositions in the family’s civil suit last fall, they refused to answer questions.
Those failures of accountability were compounded by the criminal justice system’s floundering. In 2019, after a two-year FBI investigation, Justice Department prosecutors declined to file charges, relying on a reading of the law unmoored from common sense. They asserted that evidence was lacking to prove the officers “willfully” took Ghaisar’s life, based on their conclusion that shooting him repeatedly, for no good reason, did not amount to a “bad purpose to disregard the law.” By that overly broad standard, almost no police officers could be criminally charged in an unwarranted killing.
The following year, Virginia state prosecutors charged the officers with manslaughter; the case was shifted to federal court, where a judge dismissed it. The state appealed that ruling, but the attorney general, Jason Miyares, ordered the appeal dropped soon after he was elected in 2021. He never contacted Ghaisar’s parents before doing so.
A clear video of Ghaisar’s pursuit and shooting was recorded by the dash cam in a Fairfax County police cruiser that trailed the Park Police for most of the incident. Any reasonable person who watches it, knowing the chase was undertaken after an insignificant traffic event, can immediately grasp that police had no cause to escalate the incident, let alone open fire. Ghaisar himself exercised poor judgment by twice driving away after the police tried to stop him. That was cause for the officers to be annoyed or angry. It did not give them a license to kill when, on the third stop, his car crept forward while turning away from them.
The Ghaisars’ civil suit, from which the two officers were dismissed, was the family’s last recourse, their final hope to secure a modest acknowledgment of the outrage of their son’s death. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton, who is overseeing the case, would be wise to approve the settlement.
If he does, that would likely be the last word in a case that has disgraced the Park Police, which has remained mum about it to this day. Still, some reforms seem to have been inspired at least partly by Ghaisar’s killing, as The Post’s Tom Jackman has written. A new Park Police chief initiated a body-camera program last year — a first for the agency — following testimony before Congress by Ghaisar’s mother, Kelly, on the need for them. And at this year’s state legislative session in Richmond, lawmakers passed a bill requiring Virginia’s attorney general to consult with victims or their families before summarily dismissing a case, an apparent response to Mr. Miyares’s failure to do so with the Ghaisar family.
Those modest steps are poor recompense for the death of an exceptionally well-liked, promising young man. His killing remains a reproach to this country’s inability to reckon with senseless police conduct.
