When attorney R. Anthony Rupp III was leaving Chef’s Restaurant on a December night seven years ago, he saw a vehicle without its headlights on stop just short of two pedestrians on Seneca Street. So he did what he thought the moment called for: He yelled at the driver to turn on his headlights, ending his sentence with an expletive.
Rupp didn’t know the vehicle in question was a Buffalo Police Department SUV, and his exhortation eventually led to an encounter with several police officers and landed him a ticket for violating a city noise ordinance, a ticket that he successfully challenged. Rupp wrote a letter the next day to the police commissioner about the incident, and thought that would be the end of that.
But when two officers he encountered that night were involved in an incident two months later that ended with a man’s death, Rupp decided his encounter had something in common with the man’s death: that the officers lacked the proper training and temperament for the job and they and the city needed to be held to account. So Rupp sued them.
A federal judge in Buffalo dismissed his case, but this week, an appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision and said Rupp’s case should proceed.
Rupp said he initially never intended to sue over his encounter with police that night, calling it a “stupid case.”
But Rupp changed his mind when he learned that two of the officers involved in his incident – Todd C. McAlister and Nicholas J. Parisi – were involved a few months later in the deadly arrest of Wardel “Meech” Davis. The 20-year-old unarmed African American man died Feb. 7, 2017, of an acute asthma attack exacerbated by physical exertion from when he struggled during his arrest.
The Attorney General’s Office found no evidence to warrant criminal charges against either police officer.
But the fatal arrest triggered Rupp to sue over his encounter.
“I just decided that somebody needed to stand up for…
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