$10 Million Settlement From the City of Columbus for the Family of Andre Hill, an Unarmed Man Shot by Police While Holding His Cellphone

Shortly before 2 a.m. on December 22, 2020, Columbus police officer Adam Coy responded to a non-emergency call about a man sitting in an SUV, repeatedly turning the engine on and off. Andre Hill, a 47-year-old Black man, was a guest at a house on the street and was walking out of the garage toward the officers, holding his cellphone in his left hand, when Coy shot him within seconds of encountering him. Hill was unarmed. For several minutes afterward, no officer on scene rendered first aid. He died at a nearby hospital.

Because Coy had not activated his body camera until after the shooting, the only footage of the encounter came from the camera's 60-second lookback buffer, which recorded video without audio, enough to show how quickly Coy fired and how little Hill had done to provoke it. The fallout was swift by the standards of police shootings: Coy was fired within days, and the city's mayor publicly apologized to Hill's family.

Hill's family retained Ben Crump, fresh off the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cases, to lead their civil claim against the city. Rather than years of litigation, the case moved to resolution in under five months. On May 17, 2021, the Columbus City Council unanimously approved a $10 million settlement with Hill's family, the largest settlement of any kind in the city's history, and, as Crump noted at the time, the largest pretrial payment for a police use-of-force case in Ohio.

The settlement included a symbolic term alongside the money: the city agreed to rename the gymnasium at the Brentnell Community Recreation Center, where Hill had spent time, in his honor. The Hill family and their lawyers publicly credited city leaders for taking responsibility rather than forcing a grieving family through protracted litigation.

Accountability in the criminal courts came later. Coy was indicted for murder, and in November 2024 a Franklin County jury convicted him of murder in Hill's death; he was subsequently sentenced to prison. The Hill settlement stands as one of the clearest examples of the pattern Crump's national practice established in the early 2020s: pairing intense public advocacy with civil litigation to produce record-setting municipal settlements without a trial.