Members of the Norman City Council will vote on a settlement of $650,000 for the estate of Marconia Kessee, a man who died in police custody in 2018, during its meeting on Tuesday.
Kessee, 34, was found unresponsive in a cell at the Cleveland County Detention Center on Jan. 16, 2018, two hours after an altercation with police. Later that evening, Kessee was pronounced dead at Norman Regional Hospital.
Body camera footage released after Kessee’s death showed two officers, Daniel Brown and Kyle Canaan, taunting a distressed Kessee outside Norman Regional Hospital’s Porter Avenue campus.
Brown and Canaan made several disparaging remarks to Kessee during the encounter, later dragging him across about 75 feet of pavement in front of the hospital. The officers then arrested Kessee and brought him to the county jail, where he was later found unconscious.
The incident was not reported as a use of force.
In 2019, the representative of Kessee’s estate, Patricia Thompson, filed for a civil rights action against the city under the Fourth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. According to a staff report included in the council's Tuesday agenda, the court appointed Brittany Reid as successor personal representative of the state on June 16, 2022.
Federal court records were obtained through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, and the case was settled on Feb. 23.
According to the staff report, Reid agreed to settle the case with the city for $650,000.
In 2011, the council agreed to a $173,704 settlement for former police officer John Terry, who was fired for shooting a man during an arrest attempt. The city awarded $40,000 to the man Terry shot, Sang Van Nguyen.
In 2018, the city settled with the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters for $60,000 after the release of surveillance footage showing former OU football player and Cincinnati Bengals running back Joe Mixon hitting an OU student.
City Attorney Kathryn Walker wrote in a statement to OU Daily she understood the settlement to be in line with other settlements. While the city was listed as a defendant, so were three other individually named city employees: Brown, Canaan and former Norman Police Chief Keith Humphrey.
The city provided outside counsel for the three city employees to avoid any conflict of interest with the city’s defense. According to Walker, the settlement would address the cases against all four defendants, totaling about $162,500 per defendant for Kessee’s estate.
This story was edited by Alexia Aston and Taylor Smith. Cooper Marshall and Mary Ann Livingood copy edited this story.
