San Jose: Record $8 million settlement approved for K’aun Green shooting at La Victoria in 2022
SAN JOSE — The City Council has approved a record $8 million settlement for K’aun Green, an Oakland native and aspiring professional football player who was shot and wounded nearly four years ago by a now-former San Jose police officer who was later embroiled in a racist texting scandal in which he denigrated Green to his colleagues.
Green’s shooting on March 27, 2022 became quickly controversial after it surfaced that he had actually disarmed a gunman during a brawl inside a La Victoria taqueria near San Jose State University — where he had been on a campus visit — and he and his attorneys asserted he was holding the handgun pointed up in the air as he backed out of the restaurant entrance.
Green claimed in a lawsuit that has gone back and forth through federal courts for several years that he was then shot; he reported that he heard a cacophony of police orders and had not yet turned to face officers assembled at the front of the taqueria. Then-officer Mark McNamara shot Green four times.
“The settlement is an important step toward him reclaiming the life that he had worked so hard to build. Keep in mind, he was a hero, and yet to the world he was cast as the villain,” said Adante Pointer, a civil-rights attorney whose firm Lawyers for the People represented Green. “He was doing everything that we would want and hope someone would do when confronted with a situation like that, which is spring into action, save himself and others, and try to assist the police. And as opposed to him getting a medal, he received metal bullets.”
Tuesday, the City Council quickly approved the item, with no discussion, in a unanimous 11-0 vote.
In a Dec. 17 memo recommending that the City Council approve the settlement, City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood wrote: “This is a negotiated settlement between the parties to avoid the risks inherent in litigation. The proposed agreement will conclude the litigation without further cost, expense, or risk of loss to the City or City employees.”
The settlement, in which the city does not admit fault, appears to be the largest involving a police shooting in San Jose’s history; a search of Mercury News archives dating back to 1985 shows nothing approaching that monetary amount.
However, it is not the city’s largest-ever payout for an individual police misconduct claim: That distinction goes to the $12 million settlement reached in 2024 with Lionel Rubalcava, a man who was arrested and convicted for a 2002 San Jose shooting and spent 17 years in jail and prison before he was exonerated with help from the Northern California Innocence Project.
In Green’s shooting, security video recorded at the restaurant, and subsequently released to the public, generally aligned with his version of events. The police department and city sought to contextualize McNamara’s actions by emphasizing that the taqueria brawl unfolded a few hundred feet away from the crime scene of a recent fatal shooting, and that when officers saw people fleeing from the restaurant, they thought they might be dealing with the shooter.
Green, now 24, was a football star at Oakland’s McClymonds High School. He has since recovered from his injuries and is a scholarship athlete playing defensive end at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff.
The city sought to get Green’s lawsuit dismissed at multiple junctures, including the summary judgment phase of the litigation when they contended Green’s claims did not support an excessive force finding. That was rejected by a federal judge, as was the city’s argument that McNamara was entitled to qualified immunity — a legal doctrine that protects government officials from litigation over their work actions absent a clear constitutional violation.
The 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld the latter ruling in September, putting the parties on track to either go to trial or reach a settlement.
Further complicating the case was the revelation from San Jose police in November 2023 that McNamara participated in a trove of racist text messages sent between him and an active SJPD officer and a separate former officer. The messages included repeated uses of the N-word and crass references by McNamara regarding his shooting of Green, including “N— wanted to carry a gun in the Wild West … Not on my watch” and “They should all be bowing to me and bringing me gifts since I saved a fellow n— by making him rich as f—. Otherwise, he woulda lived a life of poverty and crime.”
McNamara resigned from the department in the wake of the scandal. Green’s attorneys tried unsuccessfully to use the scandal to gain a swift resolution in their favor, and they continued to pursue their litigation toward the conclusion reached Tuesday.
“It’s been a testament of faith. It’s been a testament of courage. This is an incident that would shake, I think anyone would agree, would shake someone to their core … and when you look up as it relates to Mr. Green, he looks up and not only is he physically injured, but also psychologically injured,” Pointer said. “Keep in mind, this young man didn’t have a record. He did the right thing and was handcuffed to a bed for two days without the advice, the comfort of his family or an attorney. (But) he had faith that the truth would come out. We had to fight to get the truth out.”
The most recent high-figure settlement related to a San Jose police shooting was last year, when the council approved a $1 million settlement to the family of David Tovar Jr., who police shot and killed during a 2021 foot chase at an East San Jose apartment complex. That case was scandalized in part by a federal judge’s ruling that an officer’s decision to sic a police dog on a mortally wounded Tovar constituted excessive force.
There have been several million-dollar civil payouts related to police shootings in San Jose in the past decade, highlighted by the $2.6 million a 2019 federal civil jury awarded to the family of Anthony Nunez, who was shot and killed by police during a suicidal episode three years earlier. Another federal civil jury, in 2022, awarded the family of Jacob Dominguez $1 million after a trial that found a San Jose police officer liable for excessive force in Dominguez’s 2017 shooting death.