JACKSON, Miss.—The family of George Robinson, who died in 2019 following an encounter with three Jackson police officers, will receive a $17,786.25 payment after the Jackson City Council unanimously approved it to settle a civil lawsuit.
On Jan. 13, 2019, three officers were searching the Washington Addition neighborhood for a suspect related to the shooting death of Pastor Anthony Longino.
The officers spotted the 62-year-old Robinson, who was not a suspect in that crime, sitting in a vehicle and pulled him from the car and beat him, witnesses said at the time. Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart ruled Robinson’s death a homicide and noted in her autopsy report that there were signs of blunt-force trauma to Robinson’s head.
Though the council’s vote was unanimous, Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes told WLBT on April 23, 2024, that he believed the financial settlement should have been more. “I’m saying it just sends the wrong message about human life, especially Black people’s lives,” Stokes said. “I think a step in the right direction would’ve been to pay the family a little bit more. Some people not going to support the idea of how much was made, others might, but a lot of people going to have a bad taste in their mouth.”
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George Robinson’s sister, Bettersten Wade, said at the time that just weeks before his death, he had suffered from a stroke on Christmas day. “He was still recovering,” she said at a press conference on Jan. 24, 2019.
“I feel that the officers that was involved in this, they should be just like any other citizen: They should be in jail, because they brutalized my brother,” she said at the time.
George Robinson died following an encounter with three Jackson, Miss., police officers on Jan. 13, 2019. Witnesses said at the time that they saw the officers pull Robinson out of his vehicle and beat the 62-year-old man who died days later. Photo courtesy Kimberly Sweet
A grand jury indicted the three officers—Anthony Fox, Lincoln Lampley and Desmond Barney—in 2020 for charges related
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