The City of Seattle has ended its legal battle with a group of Capitol Hill property owners and businesses that claimed the city showed “deliberate indifference” over its handling of 2020’s CHOP occupied protest in what could be a multimillion dollar settlement over thousands of missing text messages from top officials including then-Mayor Jenny Durkan, her Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, and Seattle Fire Chief Scoggins.

City Attorney Ann Davison’s office announced the settlement of the federal lawsuit in a Wednesday filing in U.S. District Court. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and the sides in the suit will have until March to bang out the final agreement, according to Davison’s filing.

The city has said Capitol Hill-based developer and property manager Hunters Capital was seeking $2.9 million in damages in the case while 12th and Pine’s Richmark Label is seeking $90,000 for lost business. Dollar totals for the other plaintiffs were not disclosed in the course of the multi-year legal fight after the lawsuit was first filed in June of 2020.

The Seattle Times was first to report the settlement.

UPDATE 2/17/2022: KOMO reports the city has agreed to pay $3,650,000 in the case — including $600,000 in legal fees for the representation for the plaintiffs, the law firm of Morgan, Lewis and Bockius.

The deal comes as Davison was preparing for a trial in the case under heavy sanctions after a federal judge agreed with the plaintiffs that the city had not properly retained crucial text message records from the time of the Black Lives Matter protests and camps on Capitol Hill.

In the “Spoliation of Evidence” motion brought by the collection of Cal Anderson Park-area property owners and businesses, lawyers said that a combination of factory resets, 30-day auto deletions, and manual deletions wiped away key evidence and that forensic efforts to recreate some of the communication between officials from that summer of 2020 were inadequate. The judge agreed.

According to the motion, phones of Durkan, Best, and SPD top brass Chris Fisher were set to automatically delete texts after 30 days. Additionally, the motion calls out Durkan, Best, and Idris Beauregard, a Seattle Public Utilities representative who found himself as the default face of City Hall during his regular interactions at the protest site, for manually deleting “hundreds or thousands of texts each.”

The federal civil rights case led by Capitol Hill-based developer Hunters Capital and a group of real estate and business plaintiffs sought financial damages for the group of businesses in the Pike/Pine and 12th Ave areas around the camp and protest zone over the city’s alleged “deliberate indifference.” Last May, a judge ruled against a motion to form a class action that would have allowed other businesses and property owners to join the long running case.

The summer 2020 lawsuit was filed as the CHOP camp was still occupied with the list of plaintiffs growing to including developers Hunters Capital, Redside Partners and Madrona Real Estate, businesses Cafe Argento, Northwest Liquor, Bergman’s Lock and Key, Car Tender, Tattoos and Fortune, Sage Physical Therapy, Richmark Label, and property owners including Onyx Homeowners Association as well as a handful of individual residents.

After CHOP’s clearance, E Pine’s Rancho Bravo, 12th and Pike’s Sway and Cake boutique, and Nagle’s Cure cocktail bar joined the roster.

A handful of small businesses including Rancho Bravo, Sage Physical Therapy, the liquor shop, and Cafe Argento, the 12th Ave coffee shop the New York Times featured in its August 2020 profile on the case, have since dropped out of the lawsuit. Others including Car Tender and Bergman’s Lock and Key have moved from the neighborhood or gone out of business.

City Attorney Ann Davison’s office had argued that representatives including Hunters Capital owner Michael Malone also did not retain text messages and emails exchanged during the CHOP protest and sometimes used the privacy-focused Signal app to communicate about the situation. One example, the city said, is Richmark Label owner Bill Donner who “confirmed that he was at the ‘center’ of CHOP and exchanged many texts about it, but deleted them forever.”

While the settlement could be a financial victory for the plaintiffs, it comes after months of litigation and any deal will surely involve enormous legal fees.

It will also deny those interested in an expanded record of evidence and testimony around the city’s actions during CHOP from seeing the case brought in front of a federal jury.

The city’s legal fallout from CHOP has also included lawsuits brought over the deaths of young men shot and killed during the protest camp. Last year, the city settled one wrongful death lawsuit in the June 2020 shooting of 19-year-old Lorenzo Anderson on the edge of the protest.

There are still criminal cases yet to reach justice — though most have long since been wrapped up. One of the most significant will be the prosecution of Nikolas Fernandez, the brother of an East Precinct cop accused of shooting a protester at 11th and Pine. Fernandez’s trial has been repeatedly delayed.

Another major case still hanging over the city is the wrongful death lawsuit brought on behalf of dozens of plaintiffs including the estate of Summer Taylor, the Capitol Hill activist hit and killed by a speeding driver as Washington State Patrol closed I-5 during a July 2020 protest.

With the settlement of the Hunters Capital case, Seattle City Hall is one step closer to putting that legal fallout from CHOP behind it even as many of the social and government issues that led to it remain.

$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
🌈🐣🌼🌷🌱🌳🌾🍀🍃🦔🐇🐝🐑🌞🌻 
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.

Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 👍