Brutality suit seen likely in pepper-pellet death

Boston police will almost certainly face a brutality lawsuit seeking millions of dollars in damages in the fatal shooting of 21-year-old Victoria Snelgrove with a pepper pellet, said several lawyers who have both sued and defended the city in civil rights cases.

Lawyers also predicted yesterday that there will be similar legal claims from two men who say they were also hit in the face with the pellets as police tried to control crowds celebrating the Red Sox victory last week clinching the American League pennant. All the lawsuits would target the officers who fired the weapons and the city itself for police practices or training.

Several legal specialists expect that product-liability suits will probably be filed against the manufacturer of the compressed-air guns that fire the pellets, FN Herstal, which markets the weapons as "less lethal."

The relatives of Snelgrove, an Emerson College student, "clearly have a lawsuit, a multimillion-dollar lawsuit," said Howard Friedman, a Boston lawyer. "The question is: Who can they sue?"

Friedman sued the city in 1986 after a high-ranking officer, Robert E. O'Toole Jr., who was in charge of crowd-control efforts early Thursday, was caught on videotape by a television news crew slapping a fan, the last time the Sox were in the World Series.

Patrick T. Jones, the lawyer for Snelgrove's family, said it is premature to discuss litigation, given that her death is still the subject of an internal investigation and that many details have not been made public.

Jones said he still needs basic information, such as which officer fired the pellet that hit Snelgrove, described as a bystander.

"I think probably we're getting ahead of ourselves in talking about who's going to get sued," he said.

Jeffrey A. Denner, a lawyer for Kapila Bhamidipati, a Boston University student who also says he was seriously injured by a pellet to the head, said he is considering a product-liability suit against FN Herstal.

"The defendants in this case are not just in Boston," he said. "There has to be some looking into . . . the manufacturers of these so-called nonlethal weapons."

Seth Gitell, a spokesman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said that "the city is attempting to handle the situation with dignity and respect for all parties involved" and had no comment about potential litigation.

Officials at FN Herstal did not return phone calls for comment yesterday.

Still, legal specialists said that the circumstances surrounding Snelgrove's death make it all but certain that her family will sue under federal civil rights statutes.

The shooting happened when a racuous, alcohol-fueled celebration in Kenmore Square of the Sox victory spun out of control and turned into a clash between police and a small number of bottle-throwing revelers.

The key question in police brutality cases is whether officers used an appropriate amount of force, given the threat to public safety, legal specialists said. Even if someone is committing a crime, officers do not have the right to take action that can result in serious injury or death.

That is especially true when dealing with crowds.

"Before the police discharged weapons in a crowd that consisted mostly of innocent people, there has to be a severe threat to either the general public or the police officers involved," said David W. White-Lief, who sued the Braintree police on behalf of a union worker mauled by a police dog while picketing outside a construction site in 1996.

Even when fans began climbing the fabled Green Monster, White-Lief said, police should have used the lowest level of force, including ordering them to come down or waiting to arrest them when they did.

Paul Gately, a 24-year-old Cambridge resident, said that he was shot with a pellet in the face as he clambered up the Fenway landmark and needed 19 stitches to sew up a hole above his top lip.

Other factors likely to bolster a case against the city include the fact that the Police Department only recently bought the weapons for security at this summer's Democratic National Convention and that officers had never used them on the streets before.

"How much time did they have to train the officers?" said Michael Avery, a professor at Suffolk University Law School and author of a leading reference manual on police misconduct suits.

"How much did the top brass of the city even know about the risks of these weapons? Did the city perhaps rush to get them into the streets after the [convention] because they were eager to try them out?"

Douglas Louison, who has defended police officers throughout the state against brutality claims, said one of the problems with "less lethal" weapons such as the pepper-pellet gun is that officers have less control than they did with traditional crowd-control tools, such as billy clubs and police dogs. But growling German shepherds and police batons became less popular because they evoked police abuses in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War era.

Louison, nonetheless, said that, based on videotape footage of last week's incident, he believes that officers faced a "truly overwhelming group of aggressive people." If the Police Department is sued, he predicted that the city might blame FN Herstal and in turn sue the company for selling a weapon that turned out to be lethal.

The city insures itself against lawsuits, Louison said.

John Ellement of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.