BREAKING: Seattle jury finds Washington State NOT NEGLIGENT in death of activist Summer Taylor killed during BLM highway shut-down in 2020

A Seattle jury has found Washington state not negligent in the death of Summer Taylor, a leftist activist who was struck and killed by a driver while illegally protesting on I-5 in 2020. Taylor was marching alongside Black Lives Matter and Antifa during an anti-police protest near downtown Seattle when she was killed.

The family of Summer Taylor filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the state, seeking $24 million in damages. After a nearly three-week trial, the jury returned a verdict on Thursday, finding the state not liable for the activist's death.

The suit, filed in Sept. 2020, claimed that the Washington State Patrol failed to protect the anti-police activists on the roadway, despite the fact that protesting on highways is unlawful under state law. The family also alleged that Seattle Police failed to protect the violent rioters from harm.

The jury determined that the driver, Dawit Kelete, was the only culpable party when he drove through a crowd of BLM demonstrators. Kelete was ordered to pay $6 million in damages, as reported by Komo News. He was sentenced last year to 6.5 years in prison after pleading guilty to vehicular homicide, aggravated assault, and reckless driving.

Attorney Karen Koehler claimed that the state patrol did not take sufficient measures to prevent Kelete from driving toward the Black Lives Matter protest group that was positioned on I-5. She argued that the Washington State Patrol should have closed the off-ramps or arrested the demonstrators who unlawfully entered the highway. Failure to close the off-ramps, she said, resulted in Kelete driving his vehicle up the off-ramp in the wrong direction, and then striking Taylor and injuring another protester.

Koehler told the court that "the state made a decision to change its rules."

"The rule had been to keep the protesters off the freeway and arrest them," the attorney said. "This is an unprecedented circumstance. The [Department of Transportation] is allowing protesters to be on the freeway. Did their actions result in a reasonably safe environment?"

 

Steve Puz, senior counsel for the Washington State Attorney General's Office, contended that state troopers adhered to incident management plans that mandated the closure of on-ramps and the complete closure of the freeway miles north of the protest. He said that both Taylor and Kelete committed criminal acts and should be found negligent for their actions.

"They're blaming the state for not stopping their criminal conduct," Puz said during his closing argument. "Mr. Kelete and Mx. Taylor are both negligent. They were both engaged in illegal acts at the time of this incident."

According to an investigation, Kelete purposefully drove up the wrong way at the Stewart Street exit ramp, turned around on I-5, and headed in the direction of the demonstrators gathered on the interstate. Kelete claimed he did not intend to hit the protesters and was just trying to get home.

Puz told the jurors that Kelete's actions were outrageous, uncommon, and rare. "You all heard his testimony where he said that he knew it was an exit ramp. He knew it was illegal to drive up it, and he did it anyway and to pretend otherwise is disrespectful," Puz said.

Attorney Koehler argued during closing statements: "Not a day goes by, not a moment goes by that this family isn't affected. They made the intentional deliberate, absolutely knowing, but apparently uneducated, decision to leave the ramps, the access ramps - off-ramps or on-ramps - the third access point, they left them open."

On Monday, Puz played a video in court that showed a state trooper asking a group of protesters to leave the highway during a separate protest on June 15, 2020, just a few weeks before the tragedy. The state trooper was met with hostility and defiance. 

"It's not safe, I'm telling you right now, we've got traffic coming - I don't want you guys to get hurt," the trooper can be heard talking to the protesters on I-5, as per Komo News. "I need you guys to get off the freeway."

The protesters responded to the order by calling him a "coward."

Background

The incident occurred just days after the infamous deadly Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone had been dismantled, in which BLM/Antifa militants violently seized a six-block radius in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle after overthrowing the SPD East Precinct. The violent protesters established barriers equipped with armed checkpoints, attacked innocent people, and killed several others.

Despite the unlawful insurrectionist zone being dismantled after nearly a month of anarchy, Seattle rioters continued with their anti-police protests.


Pictured: Summer Taylor, left, Dawit Kelete, right.

On July 4, 2020, Summer Taylor, 24, who identified as nonbinary, participated in an anti-police protest on the I-5 highway alongside Antifa and BLM militants near downtown Seattle. A vehicle driven by Dawit Kelete, 30, sped through the group of protesters, striking and killing Taylor, and injuring another. Kelete, a black man, pleaded guilty last year to vehicular homicide, aggravated vehicular assault, and reckless driving. He was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison.
 

Many activists incorrectly speculated at the time of the fatal crash that Taylor's death was caused by "white supremacists."

The family alleged that Taylor's death was due to the Seattle Police Department engaging in "discrimination and brutality" against the protesters who were fighting "against police discrimination and brutality."

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