A federal judge has ordered a new trial to determine whether a young man shot by an Oklahoma City police officer in 2019 should receive monetary damages.
The judge ruled the officer’s attorney had made an improper argument that could have swayed the jury and decided to dismiss the original verdict from March 2025. Jurors at the time decided not to award Lorenzo Clerkley any damages in his lawsuit against police Sgt. Kyle Holcomb.
Clerkley was 14 when Holcomb shot him twice after police received a 911 call about a possible home burglary in southeast OKC. Clerkley and friends had actually been playing at the abandoned house with non-lethal airsoft guns, the sounds of which Holcomb said he thought was “a cap gun” as he approached the home in body-worn camera video released after the incident.
Clerkley had climbed out of a window near where Holcomb was standing on the other side of a tattered wooden fence. Holcomb, with his handgun pointed through a hole in the fence, yelled orders for Clerkley to show his hands and “drop it” and then almost instantaneously fired four shots, striking the boy in his hip and thigh.
The case drew citywide attention after then-Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater declined to charge Holcomb and cleared him to return to active duty. The prosecutor said the officer’s body camera footage showed that Clerkley “had an object in his hand that appeared to be a firearm” and that Holcomb’s use of deadly force was lawful. But a federal civil court judge acknowledged that questions remain to this day about what really happened in the moments before the shooting.
Daniel Smolen, Clerkley’s lead attorney, argued during a week-long trial that Holcomb had used excessive force and had violated Clerkley’s Fourth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution.
Previous coverage: Jury decides in favor of OKC police officer who shot teenage boy in 2019
Holcomb’s lead attorney Steve Geries, during his closing argument to the jury, asked that Clerkley be awarded nothing, suggesting that if other officers heard about a different outcome, they might hesitate to shoot in high-stress situations while on duty and wind up dead.
“If this jury finds against Kyle Holcomb, every law enforcement officer in this state is going to hear about it,” Geries told the jury. “And when those officers get in that situation and have to hesitate because they fear what this jury does, then those officers are going to end up wounded or dead.”
But Judge Charles Goodwin, who presided over the case in Oklahoma City federal district court, swiftly told the jurors that they should disregard Geries’ “improper” suggestion, calling it “unfounded and immaterial.”
Charles B. Goodwin is a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma.
Defense requested retrial after attorney’s remarks
Four weeks after the trial ended, Clerkley’s attorneys requested a new one, claiming that Geries’ remark, “delivered with high volume, emphasis and passion,” was “highly prejudicial” and “truly outrageous,” likely swaying the jury.
“Without a shred of evidence, defense counsel told the jury that — if they found Holcomb liable — they would have police officers’ blood on their hands,” Clerkley’s attorneys wrote. “This was wholly improper.”
In response, Geries’ contended his statement was “an isolated one” and that “any prejudice that might have been caused was cured” after Goodwin objected to the statement and told the jury to ignore it. But in an order filed Tuesday, March 31, Goodwin agreed that Geries’ statement had been “extraordinarily” prejudicial.
“This was an extreme example of an attorney asking the jury to decide a case based on sympathy — the common concern for the safety of the men and women working for police agencies across the state — rather than an impartial assessment of the evidence in the case,” Goodwin wrote. “The Court cannot in this instance find that no influence occurred simply because only one improper statement was made.”
Geries did not return phone calls by publication time Thursday.
Tensions in the case largely centered on what Holcomb claimed to have seen in Clerkley’s hand, and whether what he saw justified the use of deadly force.
Clerkley maintained at the time of the shooting, during subsequent interviews with police and during the 2025 trial that he did not have a gun when he was shot. When he was detained within minutes of the shooting at the house, he had no weapon in his possession.
“I didn’t have a gun, and I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Clerkley said during the trial. “As an officer, you’re supposed to protect and serve, and I wasn’t doing anything wrong for him to use deadly force on me.”
Laura Neal, one of Clerkley’s attorneys, had asked the jury to award him $10 million in damages.
Holcomb and his lawyers, however, argued that Clerkley was holding an object that “looked like a Glock replica,” which “does not look like a toy gun.” Holcomb, when asked about his thought process during the moment of the shooting, was adamant that Clerkley had what he believed to be a real gun and that Clerkley gave him no other choice but to shoot.
Geries reiterated Holcomb’s account during his closing arguments, while also telling the jury that Holcomb was “an important part of many people’s lives” as a husband and father.
“He sat in the witness stand, having every tiny detail of everything he did, every decision he made, put under a high-powered microscope, from the time he left to drive to the scene until the very end of the scene ― everything,” Geries said in court last year. “It was excruciating, yet he remained professional.”
“Sgt. Holcomb is the kind of officer that should make Oklahomans and Oklahoma City proud,” Geries continued. “He’s the kind of officer that a citizen hopes for when they are forced to dial 911. That’s the guy you want.”
Goodwin wrote that he believed the weight of the evidence in the case reflected “a close decision” when presented to jurors. Both sides presented body-worn camera footage, with lawyers also pointing to statements made that were inconsistent, Goodwin wrote, with trial testimonies from both Holcomb and Clerkley.
But information presented in court by both parties “did not plainly resolve the question” of whether Clerkley had some sort of gun in his hand when confronted by Holcomb, or if Clerkley had pointed a gun at Holcomb when the officer shot him, the judge said.
“Because the jury was presented with a close decision,” Goodwin wrote, “the Court finds that the jury deliberations were subject to influence in a way that would not be the case if the evidence had strongly favored one side or the other.”
Goodwin vacated the 2025 verdict and judgment, moving for a new trial on the next scheduled jury docket. A notice to lawyers states all parties should be prepared to begin trial on May 12.
Smolen told The Oklahoman that Goodwin had “made the correct decision” based on Geries’ conduct.
“The inappropriate arguments advanced during the closing argument by the City of Oklahoma City are universally prohibited by federal district court across the United States, as they are highly prejudicial to the justice process and have no place in the courtroom,” Smolen said in a statement Thursday. “Juries who are faced with such arguments are inherently tainted and cannot objectively participate in the deliberation process. We are looking forward to retrying this case at the earliest possible date, and ultimately obtaining justice for Lorenzo Clerkley and his family.”
A spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City Police Department could not comment on the case due to in-progress litigation.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: New trial ordered in civil case of OKC officer shooting 14-year-old
