Shortly after midnight, in the early morning hours of July 24, 2017, Southaven resident Ismael Lopez was at home asleep next to his wife.
A commotion outside of his small mobile home at 5881 Surrey Lane roused him from bed. Moments later, three bullets ripped through his front door. One of the shots caught Ismael in the back of the head and dropped him where he stood. Ismael died.
What happened in the moments immediately preceding his death has been the subject of prolonged dispute between attorneys for Lopez’s widow, Claudia Linares, and the City of Southaven.
The Southaven police officers involved in the death of Lopez say he came to his door with a gun, an act which, in and of itself, is not illegal in Mississippi.
Ismael’s family and attorneys disagreed with the officers’ account of events. There were no body cameras to record what happened.
What is undisputed is that Ismael was not suspected of, or wanted for, any crime. There were no active warants. The police simply went to the wrong house, in the middle of the night, in search of a different person.
On Thursday, more than six years after the incident, a jury found that the officers involved were not civilly liable for the death of Lopez. The civil verdict comes years after a decision not to criminally charge the officers involved.
A Tragic Sequence of Events
Samuel Pearman lived across the street from Lopez at 5878 Surrey Lane. On the evening of July 23, 2017, a complaint was filed against Pearman for domestic assault. The woman who filed the complaint alleged that Pearman had choked her in front of her child at a Citgo gas station located in Tate County.
Pearman left the scene of the alleged incident and traveled north to his home in DeSoto County. A sheriff’s deputy in Tate County, Stanley Perry, contacted the Southaven Police Department about the incident. Southaven patrol officers Zachary Durden and Samuel Maze, along with Sergeant Thomas Jones, proceeded to Surrey Lane to find Pearman around midnight.
The woman who filed the complaint against Pearman