After the MP shot the man, the man’s family sued, but the MP received an award

The Colorado Sheriff’s Department is under fire after one of its deputies received an award for injuries sustained in a violent incident last year.

Pueblo County Deputy Sheriff Charles McWhorter’s awards ceremony this month came just days before the family of the man he shot in the same incident filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court.

McWhorter’s Purple Heart award first announced pueblo chief.

Darold Kilmer, an attorney for Richard Ward’s family, said in a statement emailed to NPR that Ward’s family was unaware of the award prior to filing the lawsuit, but that it was “a really brazen act that satirizes the very purpose of the Purple Heart.”

“Pueblo’s cynical attempts to somehow make McWhorter a hero under the circumstances are abhorrent,” Killmer said.

The Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment.

On February 22, 2022, authorities said that Pueblo County sheriff’s deputies were called to a local high school to investigate “reports of a man banging on vehicle windows.”

Newly released body camera footage shows McWhorter talking to Ward, who is sitting in the back seat of his mother’s car. Ward’s mother and her boyfriend are in the front seats, and the three of them were waiting to pick up Ward’s younger brother from Liberty Point International High School.

According to his family, Ward went for a short walk while they waited. In the footage, Ward explains to McWhorter that when he returned from a walk, he mistakenly got into another car that looked like his mother’s. Ward says he apologized to the driver and drove away.

MacWhorter asks Ward if he has an ID or any weapons, and Ward says he might have a penknife, but doesn’t show it. Instead, Ward finds an anti-anxiety pill and takes it.

McWhorter loudly asks Ward what he put in his mouth before he and Deputy Cassandra Gonzalez pull Ward out of the car and slam him to the ground.

After a brief fight, McWhorter shoots Ward three times, who was unarmed. McWhorter tells Gonzalez, “He headbutted me in the nose and then tried to grab my things.”

According to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family, Ward suffered from anxiety about the police and took an anti-anxiety pill in the back seat of a car.

The lawsuit, which lists McWhorter and Gonzalez, other officers and Pueblo County as defendants, alleges that McWhorter “did not have a legitimate law enforcement purpose” to fire the gun and violated Ward’s constitutional rights.

In October, Colorado’s 10th Judicial District Attorney J. E. Chastner concluded that McWhorter and Gonzalez’s use of force was justified and that no criminal charges would be brought against them.

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