On the night of January 28, 2025, Wilson was at downtown’s Santa Fe Depot when another teen pulled a gun and began shooting at him on the train platform. Wilson ran for his life, sprinting through a corridor toward Kettner Boulevard. At the same time, San Diego Police Officer Daniel Gold, then two years on the force, moved toward the sound of gunshots with his weapon drawn. Within seconds of Wilson coming into view, Gold fired into the teen’s back as he ran past, dropping him on the sidewalk.
The body-worn camera footage, released by SDPD in February and embedded below, is chilling in its simplicity. Gold appears to fire at the first person who bursts out of the corridor, without any visible attempt to determine whether Wilson is the shooter or a victim fleeing an attack. The Los Angeles Times and other outlets have noted that Gold fired twice before identifying himself as police. Wilson was transported to a hospital and pronounced dead about half an hour later.
Police ultimately said they recovered a gun concealed under Wilson’s clothing near his right thigh while administering medical aid, but there is no evidence he ever fired it or pointed it at anyone that night. In statements through their attorney, Wilson’s family has been blunt: the teen was “running for his life,” and the officer who killed him made a split-second decision to shoot a child in the back based on one second of visual contact.
The New York Times reports that the city attorney’s office has agreed to pay Wilson’s family $30 million, with the City Council scheduled to formally consider the settlement on Tuesday, December 9. There is no central national database for such payouts, but legal scholars say the amount places this case among the largest police-killing settlements ever recorded, a reflection of juries and municipalities increasingly willing to attach real financial penalties to deadly misconduct in the post–George Floyd era.
Yet even as San Diego quietly prepares to write one of the biggest checks in its history, the official accountability picture remains murky. SDPD has said that Officer Gold is currently on an administrative assignment while the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office reviews the shooting. There has been no public announcement of discipline, decertification, or criminal charges. The message to the public is unmistakable: the city will pay dearly for what its own attorneys evidently recognize as an indefensible killing, but the officer who pulled the trigger remains on the payroll.
The Wilson settlement also does not stand alone. It lands in the same week San Diego signed off on $21.5 million in civil settlements over the starvation death of 11-year-old Arabella McCormack, a case that exposed catastrophic failures by city, county and faith-based institutions that were supposed to protect her. Of that total, the City of San Diego will pay $10 million, Rock Church will pay $3 million, and charter school Pacific Coast Academy will pay $8.5 million, with a separate County of San Diego settlement still pending.
At the same time, the city is facing mounting scrutiny in another high-profile SDPD death: the killing of 40-year-old Gabriel Jesus Garza outside Star Bar in the Gaslamp. Surveillance video published this week shows officers Jacob Phipps and Noah McLemore keeping Garza face-down on the pavement with body-weight pressure for nearly eight minutes after he is handcuffed, including more than 90 seconds during which Phipps remains kneeling on Garza’s back even after Garza stops speaking or responding. The Medical Examiner ruled Garza’s death a homicide caused by cardiopulmonary arrest while physically restrained, and a federal wrongful-death lawsuit is now pending.
Zoom out further, and a pattern emerges across the region. In 2023, San Diego County agreed to pay $12 million to settle a lawsuit over the death of Lucky Phounsy, who was beaten, shocked with a Taser, and hogtied by sheriff’s deputies while in the midst of a mental health crisis. The county had already paid $8.1 million to the family of Nicholas Bils, shot in the back by a deputy as he fled outside the downtown jail, and continues to contest additional verdicts and awards. While those are county cases , not city, they speak to a broader local reality: law enforcement agencies in San Diego regularly generate eight-figure liabilities when force goes wrong.
For taxpayers, the financial stakes are not abstract. Academic research on police misconduct shows that officers and their unions almost never pay settlements or judgments out of pocket. In a comprehensive study of more than 80 law enforcement agencies nationwide, UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz found that governments, not individual officers, paid 99.98 percent of the dollars awarded in police misconduct cases, with cities and counties routinely indemnifying officers for both settlements and verdicts. In practice, that means residents bear the burden through general funds, liability pools, and insurance premiums, while the individual officers responsible rarely face personal financial consequences.
San Diego is no exception. The $30 million for Wilson, the $10 million city share in the Arabella McCormack case, the millions more the city has paid in other SDPD-related settlements over the past decade - all of it ultimately comes from public money that could otherwise fund homelessness response, parks, libraries, or the very social services that might prevent violence in the first place. When city leaders approve massive payouts without corresponding reforms, they are effectively socializing the costs of individual and institutional failures while doing little to prevent the next tragedy.
The Wilson video makes it especially difficult to hide behind euphemisms. There is no prolonged struggle, no chaotic scrum of officers and suspects, no split-second ambiguity about whether the teen was actively pointing a gun. There is a kid sprinting away from bullets, a corridor exit, and an officer who appears to treat the first person he sees as a target rather than a human being who might be in danger. If anyone else in San Diego shot someone in the back under those circumstances, they would almost certainly be facing a jury instead of an administrative desk assignment.
City officials will say, as they often do, that settlements are “not an admission of liability” and that they reflect litigation risk rather than a legal conclusion. But numbers of this magnitude tell their own story. Plaintiff’s counsel in the Wilson case had signaled they would seek at least $100 million at trial, and experts note that post-Floyd juries are more willing than ever to award large sums in police cases. San Diego’s willingness to pay $30 million now, less than a year from the incident, is a tacit acknowledgment that twelve ordinary citizens watching the same video might very well have done something even more dramatic.
If the city is serious about preventing future Konoa Wilsons, it is not enough to quietly settle cases and move on. SDPD’s training, policies, and culture around use of force - particularly in chaotic, low-information situations - need scrutiny. Why was an officer conditioned to shoot almost reflexively at a fleeing teenager instead of using cover, verbal commands, or basic threat assessment? Why does compressive prone restraint, widely recognized as dangerous and implicated in deaths from George Floyd to Gabriel Garza, remain functionally available in practice?
There is also a more uncomfortable conversation the city has largely avoided: whether officers and their pension systems should share any direct financial responsibility when their actions cost the public tens of millions of dollars. Some legal scholars and activists have proposed mandatory liability insurance for officers, personal contribution requirements for repeat offenders, or mechanisms to dock future pension accruals in proportion to misconduct payouts. None of those ideas is a silver bullet, and each raises complex questions about fairness and collective bargaining. But the status quo - in which the public pays, the officer keeps their full pension, and the department often closes ranks - is clearly failing to deter catastrophic mistakes.
San Diego cannot say it lacks warning signs. A boy starved to death while surrounded by mandated reporters tied to SDPD and other institutions. A man died face-down outside a bar while officers kneeled on his back and legs for nearly eight minutes. A 16-year-old surfer running from gunfire was shot in the back within seconds of crossing paths with a police officer. In case after case, the city is paying extraordinary sums to acknowledge, in dollars if not in words, that something went very wrong.
The $30 million now on the table for Konoa Wilson’s family is, at its core, an admission that his life had enormous value and that the state failed to protect it. Whether San Diego uses this moment to seriously confront how its police use force - and who should pay when they get it wrong - will determine if this record-setting settlement becomes a turning point or just another line item on a growing list of tragedies the public was forced to finance.
Originally published on December 6, 2025.
