An attorney says a Wisconsin gun shop will pay $1m to settle a lawsuit in which a jury found it negligently sold a gun that was used to injure two Milwaukee police officers.
The settlement eliminates what was expected to be a years-long appeal of an October verdict in which jurors awarded officer Bryan Norberg and former officer Graham Kunisch nearly $6m.
Badger Guns attorney James Vogts told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel late on Friday that the case has “been settled and dismissed”.
A jury found that Badger Guns and its owner negligently sold the gun used to injure the officers to a straw buyer – someone buying a gun for someone who could not legally purchase one.
It was only the second such lawsuit to get to the jury stage at trial, with the other case having been found in favour of a gun shop in Alaska in the summer.
Norberg and Kunisch were both shot in the face in 2009, during a street stop of 18-year-old Julius Burton.
He shot them with a pistol he had acquired just five weeks earlier from Badger Guns. Burton was too young legally to buy a firearm but had gone into the store with 21-year-old acquaintance Jacob Collins and pointed out the semi-automatic pistol he wanted from the display case, an act that was caught on surveillance tape.
The clerk in the store then helped Collins fill out federal forms, correcting certain entries, which betrayed the fact that the younger man was the intended recipient, the court heard.
The officers’ attorney did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
