Former Georgia college students tased by Atlanta police officers during 2020 protests receive $2M

Two former Georgia college students, who were tased and forcibly pulled from a car by Atlanta police during the 2020 George Floyd protests, will receive a $2M settlement.

Georgia college students tased receive settlement over police incident

Atlanta City Council on Monday, July 1, approved the payment to settle a federal lawsuit filed by Messiah Young and Taniyah Pilgrim. The lawsuit filed in June 2021 argued that police had no justification for pulling the two students from their car and tasing them.

Young and Pilgrim will receive $1 million each.

Confrontation

Young and Pilgrim were students at historically Black colleges in Atlanta on May 30, 2020, when they were confronted by police while stuck in traffic by protests over the killing of George Floyd.

The lawsuit claimed that while the students’ car was stopped due to heavy traffic, they were approached by six Atlanta Police Department officers, who told them to open the door and get out of the vehicle. As Pilgrim turned to get out of the car, she was tased twice while still in the passenger’s seat, according to the lawsuit.

Body camera footage released by police shows the officers smash the driver’s side window before using their tasers on the couple, forcibly pulling them from the car and throwing them to the ground.

The students said they were out picking up food when they encountered the protests. Then Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had called a citywide curfew to start at 9 p.m., but the students said in the lawsuit they were unaware of it. The incident happened around 9:40 p.m. that night, the lawsuit said.

Young was charged with eluding police but the charges were dropped the next day. Pilgrim was never charged, according to the lawsuit.

Video of the confrontation went viral, causing widespread outrage

Then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and then-Police Chief Erika Shields announced the next day that two officers had been fired and three others placed on desk duty. Then-Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard a few days later announced that arrest warrants had been obtained for the six officers.

In February 2021, the dismissals of the two officers were overturned after the Atlanta Civil Service Board found the city did not follow its own personnel protocols. And the charges against the six officers were dropped in May 2022 by a special prosecutor assigned to the case.