CINCINNATI — The mother of a 19-year-old hit and killed by a Cincinnati police officer responding to a call has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city.
The lawsuit accuses city emergency communications employees of incorrectly classifying a 911 call and triggering an unnecessary lights-and-sirens response from police officers, when that urgency longer necessary.
The lawsuit also alleges city leaders knew similar mistakes had created dangerous emergency responses before Amir Jordan’s death, but failed to correct the problem. After the crash, the suit claims, officials concealed the communications failures and gave Jordan’s family a misleading account of why the officer was responding in emergency mode.
Attorneys representing the family are scheduled to hold a news conference Wednesday at 1 p.m. to discuss the lawsuit. WCPO will be there, and we will update this story after.
Jordan was killed Aug. 29, 2024, after stepping off a Metro bus near Este and Chickering avenues. According to the complaint, Jordan was lawfully crossing Este Avenue in front of the bus when a responding police vehicle struck him around 6 p.m.
Jordan graduated from Dohn Community School in May 2024. His family said he loved animals, trained in karate and mentored younger students. He planned to become a welder.
The defendants named in the lawsuit include the city of Cincinnati, City Manager Sheryl Long, Emergency Communications Center Director William Vedra, Deputy Director Karli Piper, Operations Manager Christopher Dooley, dispatcher Chelsea Basista and call-taker Sarah Houseworth.
The officer who was driving the vehicle at the time of the crash is not named as a defendant.
Lawsuit disputes urgency of 911 call
The police response began with a 911 call reporting damage to a vehicle’s windshield and the discharge of a firearm during an earlier incident involving the caller’s girlfriend, according to the lawsuit.
The call was classified as a Priority 1-Red “Shooting (JO)” incident — a designation the lawsuit describes as reserved for a life-threatening incident in progress or one that had just occurred.
However, the complaint says the caller told Houseworth that he had not been shot. He called 911 dispatchers back and also reportedly said the woman involved was no longer at the scene and had driven away.
Despite those updates, the lawsuit alleges the incident remained classified as a shooting, and that Basista dispatched multiple police units. Eight units were assigned before Jordan was struck, according to the filing.
The complaint alleges Houseworth and Basista had nearly five minutes after learning the woman was gone to begin downgrading the call or tell officers to end their emergency response.
Six seconds before the Emergency Communications Center received the report of Jordan’s crash, the dispatcher entered an update stating, “ACCIDENT FIRE OF WEAPON NO ONE SHOT,” according to the lawsuit.
“At most, those facts described a delayed report involving property damage and a prior, accidental, unexplained, or otherwise not-in-progress firearm discharge,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit argues the emergency response would not have continued if the call had been properly classified or promptly downgraded.
We reached out to the city manager's office for a response to the allegations, but a spokesperson declined to comment given the pending litigation.
Previous warnings alleged
McClendon’s attorneys claim the mistake was part of a broader problem that city communications leaders had known about for years.
According to the filing, an Emergency Communications Center supervisor warned Dooley in October 2022 about a “dramatic uptick” in calls being coded as gun-related emergencies when the circumstances did not justify that response.
In June 2024, less than three months before Jordan’s death, the same supervisor raised concerns about a call classified as a drive-by shooting even though it reportedly involved a BB gun. A Cincinnati police lieutenant warned that officers were responding with lights and sirens to BB gun and airsoft incidents, creating a danger to police and the public, the lawsuit alleges.
An internal quality assurance review determined that the call had been miscoded, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit claims Emergency Communications Center leaders failed to conduct a systemwide audit, retrain employees or clarify policies before Jordan’s death.
It also alleges officials did not prepare required “Agency Liability Reports,” which are intended to document incidents in which communications employees may have increased the likelihood of death, injury or significant property loss.
Family alleges concealment
The complaint accuses Long, Vedra, Piper and unnamed city employees of conspiring after Jordan’s death to conceal the role of emergency communications failures.
According to the lawsuit, city officials told Jordan’s family that the police vehicle was responding to an actual life-threatening emergency. The family argues that description was false or misleading because dispatch records showed no one had been shot and the woman involved had already left.
The suit alleges Emergency Communications Center leaders also suppressed or sanitized records that would have documented operational problems.
Those allegations are supported, in part, by an affidavit from a former administrative assistant to Vedra. The complaint says she attended management meetings and claimed Vedra discouraged electronic recordings and other records that could become public.
The lawsuit says the alleged post-crash conduct did not cause the collision but demonstrates “actual malice, consciousness of wrongdoing and deliberate concealment.”
McClendon is seeking more than $25,000 in compensatory damages, with the final amount to be determined by a jury. The lawsuit also seeks wrongful death and survival damages, punitive damages against the individual defendants, attorney fees and court-supervised reforms to the city’s emergency call classification, training, auditing and quality assurance systems.
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