MILWAUKEE (CN) - After 10 hours of deliberation, a Milwaukee jury could not reach a unanimous verdict in the civil lawsuit against a former Wisconsin police officer who fatally shot a 17-year-old in a mall parking lot, resulting in a second mistrial.

In February 2020, Wauwatosa police officers were dispatched to Mayfair Mall for a dispute involving a group of teenagers, one of whom was Alvin Cole. He was described by mall security as a Black teenage male wearing a lightly colored hoodie and a fanny pack containing a handgun.

When officers arrived on the scene around 6 p.m., Cole and his friends ran away. While he was fleeing one officer and a mall security guard, his gun went off and he collapsed, according to testimony.

Just 10 seconds later, former Wauwatosa officer Joseph Mensah arrived and fired five times, killing him without announcing himself or giving any orders. He testified on Tuesday, the second day of his retrial, that he saw the gun pointed his way and fired to preserve his own life.

No criminal charges followed, but Cole's parents sued Mensah in 2022 for excessive force. The first trial in March ended with a hung jury after only two hours of deliberation. The civil retrial began on Monday in the Eastern District of Wisconsin before U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, a Bill Clinton appointee.

During deliberations, the jury requested to review the medical examiner's reports and officer David Shamsi's testimony - two crucial pieces of the plaintiffs' case. They deliberated until Wednesday night before calling it quits and restarting early Thursday morning. Cole's family stayed until the jury went home, and returned at the same time.

Mensah served as a Wauwatosa officer for five years before resigning in 2020. In that time, he fatally shot three men of color: Antonio Gonzales, who had mental health issues and refused to drop a sword; Jay Anderson Jr., a Black man who was shot in the head while asleep in his car in a public park; and Cole.

He was cleared of wrongdoing in each case, despite a federal judge finding probable cause to charge Mensah in Gonzales' death. Anderson Jr.'s family is pursuing an appeal in the Seventh Circuit.

Following his resignation, Mensah worked as a deputy sheriff in Waukesha County, another Milwaukee suburb, for five months before moving on to become a detective in the Internet Crimes Against Children Division, according to his LinkedIn.

He left the force entirely in July, citing mental health and family reasons, four months after the first civil trial.

Over three days of testimony, the plaintiffs attempted to show that Mensah did not have the legal right to use deadly force on Cole because he did not point his weapon at any officer. They used the medical examiner's report to show that Cole was likely on his hands and knees when Mensah fired, and the testimony of other officers to disprove Mensah's version of events.

Mensah is the only officer to testify that he saw the gun pointed at him. Officer Evan Olson also claimed to have seen the gun pointed, though he testified that he believed it was pointed at himself. The mall security guard, who was gaining on Cole when the first shot went off, said Cole turned and looked him in the eyes before Mensah got there.

Olson drove Mensah back to the station against protocol, which requires involved officers to isolate from each other until they can give statements to internal investigators. Neither could remember what they talked about, and the audio and video turn off when they get into Mensah's unmarked squad car, according to court records.

Attorney Nate Cade, representing Cole's estate, suggested several times that the two are close friends and synced up their stories after the shooting and before they gave statements to internal investigating officers from the Milwaukee Police Department.

"If they synced up their stories, they didn't do a good job," defense attorney Jasmine Baynard said during her closing argument on Wednesday.

Baynard made a convincing argument in closings, telling the jury that the law doesn't require Mensah to actually be in danger to use deadly force - he only needs to be able to articulate the danger he perceived himself to be in at the time.

When asked why he shot and killed Cole by his own attorneys, he said simply that he didn't want to die. He also said that when he responded to the call, which was not yet a particularly serious event, he never imagined that Cole would try to shoot his way out.

The trial was marred by frequent and tense objections, sidebars and impeachment from both sides of the case. With each witness testifying to a slightly different version of events, some seeming logistically improbable and others changing over time, the jury had the difficult task of discerning the evidence in the case from the parties' arguments and theories.

Source: Courthouse News Service