Cleared by the AG, Sued Anyway:
How Leitner Warywoda Secured $2.1 Million from Suffolk County.
Long Island | Civil Rights & Wrongful Death
See Full Newsday Article
Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, the Suffolk County Police Commissioner had reviewed the body-worn camera footage and pronounced it "justified". Two years later, the New York Attorney General's Office of Special Investigation reached the same conclusion and declined to bring charges against either officer.
By any conventional reading, that is where the case of Alan Weber ends.
It did not. On September 4, 2026, the Suffolk County Legislature approved a $2.1 million settlement of the federal civil rights lawsuit brought by Mr. Weber's estate — his wife, Geraldine, and their two children. Leitner Warywoda, PLLC represented the family. Partner Nicholas E. Warywoda litigated the case in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
"Although this doesn't bring him back, we're happy that we got some form of justice for them," Mr. Warywoda told Newsday following the vote.
The county resolved the case without admitting wrongdoing. The settlement remains subject to final court approval. But the result stands for something families in this position are almost never told: a criminal declination is not the end of a civil case. It is frequently the beginning of one.
Four Minutes on Mander Lane
Alan Weber was a competitive fencer in the 1990s. He was 54 years old, and he had a long, documented history of mental illness — a history his neighbors knew about, and one Suffolk County police were aware of long before they entered his house.
October 10, 2023 was not the county's first contact with him. A 911 call came in shortly before 7:00 p.m., reporting that Mr. Weber was arguing with a neighbor and, in the caller's words, going through mental health issues. Officers responded to the Mander Lane address more than once that day. Neighbors had been calling for weeks about escalating behavior and asking for psychiatric intervention.
The final call came that evening: Mr. Weber appeared to be breaking things inside his house and yelling. Two officers arrived. They saw him through a first-floor window. They told him to open the door. He did not.
An officer kicked the door open.
They found him alone in his basement, wearing a fencing mask, a fencing sword in each hand. They ordered him to drop them. He did not. One officer deployed a Taser twice; it had no effect. Mr. Weber advanced. The second officer fired.
From forced entry to fatal shots: roughly four minutes.
There was no hostage. No intruder. No crime in progress against another person. There was a man in psychiatric crisis, alone, in his own basement, in his own home.
"He was the only one present in the house and [the officers] just acted too quickly without thinking and following their own policies and procedures." — Nicholas E. Warywoda, quoted in Newsday
The Case Everyone Said Was Unwinnable
Understand what the defense file looked like when this case was filed in December 2024.
The officers had ordered a compliance that was refused. They had escalated through a less-lethal option first. The decedent was armed, masked, and advancing. The Police Commissioner had blessed the shooting on the record within a day. And in August 2025 the Attorney General's Office of Special Investigation — after reviewing 911 audio, both officers' body-worn camera footage, and officer interviews — concluded that a prosecutor could not disprove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer's conduct was justified under New York's justification law.
On those facts, a case litigated as a shooting case loses. Qualified immunity is designed for exactly that scenario: an officer facing an armed, advancing subject, judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene rather than with hindsight. Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989); Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985).
So this was not litigated as a shooting case.
It was litigated as a door case and a training case.
The door
The Fourth Amendment draws its firmest line at the threshold of the home. A warrantless entry into a residence is presumptively unreasonable. Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573 (1980). The emergency aid exception permits entry only where officers have an objectively reasonable basis to believe an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with serious injury. Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006).
And in 2021, the Supreme Court closed the door that municipalities had leaned on for decades: there is no freestanding "community caretaking" exception authorizing warrantless entry into a home. Caniglia v. Strom, 593 U.S. 194 (2021). Caniglia itself arose from a welfare check on a man in apparent mental distress. The parallel is not subtle.
The complaint alleged that officers entered without consent, and that there were no signs of emergency and no signs of criminal activity to justify forcing the door. That allegation reframes the entire case. If the entry was unlawful, the confrontation in the basement was not an unfortunate escalation the officers walked into — it was one the county created.
The second theory reached past the individual officers to the county itself. Under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978), a municipality is liable where its own policy, custom, or failure to train caused the constitutional violation. Where the failure to train reflects deliberate indifference to the rights of the people officers predictably encounter, the municipality answers for it directly. City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378 (1989).
Here, the Attorney General's own report supplied the roadmap. OSI issued three recommendations, and every one of them named a gap:
Mandatory crisis intervention training for all officers. Both officers in this incident had taken the training in 2022 — but the program was not mandatory.
Call for backup from specially trained emergency service officers when the person in crisis does not pose an immediate threat to others.
Call the Dash Intensive Crisis Stabilization Center hotline operated by Family Service League when the person is not a threat to others.
A criminal declination that clears two officers of personal culpability, while simultaneously recommending three systemic fixes, is not a defense verdict for the county. Read correctly, it is a municipal liability exhibit.
And Suffolk County has a history on this exact issue. Earlier this year, county lawmakers approved a $3 million settlement to the estate of Walter Kellogg — another man who struggled with mental illness, fatally shot by police in December 2018. Prior similar incidents, and what a department did in response to them, go to the heart of a deliberate indifference theory.
The estate sought $25 million. The county, having called the shooting justified from the first day, paid $2.1 million rather than put its training records, its policies, and its prior-incident history in front of an Eastern District jury.
Why the AG Declination Did Not Control
This is the point most worth carrying away, because it costs New York families viable cases every year.
The burdens are different. OSI asked whether a prosecutor could disprove justification beyond a reasonable doubt. A civil rights plaintiff proves the claim by a preponderance of the evidence. Facts that leave reasonable doubt in a criminal file can carry a civil case comfortably.
The defendants are different. OSI evaluates individual officers under Penal Law article 35. It does not evaluate whether the county's training program was constitutionally deficient. That question is not within its mandate — and it is often the strongest claim in the file.
The time frames are different. A criminal justification analysis narrows to the seconds in which force was used. A civil case reaches the decision to force the door, the failure to summon crisis-trained officers, the failure to call a mobile crisis team, and everything the county knew before it ever arrived.
When a municipality tells a grieving family that the Attorney General "already looked at this," it is describing a different question, asked under a different standard, about different defendants.
What Families Should Do After a Fatal Police Encounter
A handful of early steps materially change what a case can become.
Send a preservation letter immediately. Body-worn camera footage, radio traffic, 911 audio, CAD dispatch records, and neighbors' doorbell and surveillance video are all subject to retention schedules — some measured in weeks. "It was overwritten" is not a problem you can fix eighteen months later.
Build the timeline while it is fresh. Who called 911, when, and what they said. Whether prior calls were made about the same person. Whether anyone told dispatch the person had a psychiatric history. In a failure-to-train case, what the county knew before it arrived is frequently the most valuable evidence in the file.
Identify witnesses now. Neighbors move; memories fade. In the Weber matter, neighbors had been sounding alarms for weeks.
Open the estate. Wrongful death and survival claims belong to the estate and cannot be brought until the Surrogate's Court appoints a personal representative. Families are routinely told they "have no case" when the real problem is that no one has been appointed yet.
Watch the clocks — plural. New York law gives the estate two distinct claims: wrongful death for the distributees' pecuniary loss, EPTL § 5-4.1, and a survival claim for the decedent's conscious pain and suffering, EPTL § 11-3.2(b). State-law claims against a municipality generally require a notice of claim within a short statutory window under General Municipal Law § 50-e and are governed by a short limitations period under § 50-i. Federal § 1983 claims carry no notice of claim requirement and a longer period. Families who wait for an Attorney General investigation to conclude can forfeit the state claims while the federal claims survive. These decisions should be made early, with counsel.
Say nothing to the carrier. Municipalities and their insurers sometimes make early contact. Nothing gets signed or recorded without a lawyer.
Why This Result Matters
Settlements are compromises, and Suffolk County resolved this one without admitting wrongdoing. But the practical record is not ambiguous. A man in psychiatric crisis, alone in his own house, threatening no one else, was dead roughly four minutes after officers forced open his front door. The Attorney General's own report called for mandatory crisis intervention training, for specially trained backup, and for a mobile crisis hotline. And Suffolk County has now paid substantial settlements in at least two fatal shootings of people in mental health crisis.
Civil litigation remains one of the only mechanisms that compels a municipality to produce its training records, its written policies, and its prior-incident history — under oath, in a forum it does not control. That is what this case did, and it is why these cases matter well beyond a single family.
Talk to Leitner Warywoda
Leitner Warywoda, PLLC is a New York trial firm handling catastrophic injury, wrongful death, civil rights, medical malpractice, nursing home abuse and neglect, and construction accident cases in state and federal courts throughout New York City and Long Island. We try cases, and we brief and argue the appeals that follow them.
If your family has lost someone in an encounter with law enforcement — or if you have been told an investigation already resolved the matter — we will review the facts and explain your options at no cost.
New York City: (212) 671-1110 Long Island: (631) 240-4390 Online: nylawinjury.com
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue the police in New York if the Attorney General declined to file criminal charges? Yes. The two proceedings apply different burdens of proof, examine different time frames, and can reach different defendants. A conclusion that a prosecutor could not disprove justification beyond a reasonable doubt says nothing about whether a municipality's training program was constitutionally deficient, or whether the entry into the home was lawful in the first place.
Who can bring a wrongful death claim in New York? Not the family directly. The claim belongs to the decedent's estate and must be brought by a personal representative appointed by the Surrogate's Court, for the benefit of the distributees. This is one of the most common reasons families are wrongly told they have no case.
How long do I have to file? It depends on the claim, and the deadlines do not run together. Federal civil rights claims and state-law claims against a municipality operate on different clocks, and claims against public entities in New York generally require a formal notice of claim within a short statutory window long before any lawsuit is filed. Because those deadlines are short and unforgiving, families should speak to a lawyer well before any investigation concludes.
Can the county itself be held responsible, or only the individual officers? Both are possible. A municipality can be liable under federal law where an official policy, a custom, or a failure to train amounting to deliberate indifference caused the violation. Training records, written policies, whether training was mandatory, and how the department responded to prior similar incidents are central to that analysis.
Does mental illness change the analysis? Substantially. What the responding agency knew about the person's psychiatric history, whether crisis-intervention-trained officers or a mobile crisis team were available and deployed, and whether the department's own procedures called for a different response all bear on the lawfulness of the entry and on a failure-to-train theory.
This article is provided for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different, and the outcome of any matter depends on its own facts and the applicable law. Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case. The facts described above are drawn from public reporting, publicly filed court documents, and the published report of the New York Attorney General's Office of Special Investigation. Suffolk County resolved this matter without any admission of wrongdoing, and the settlement remains subject to final court approval. If you have questions about a specific situation, please consult a licensed attorney.