This story is part of a partnership between the Champaign-Urbana Civic Police Data Project of Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit public accountability journalism organization, and IPM News, which provides news about Illinois & in-depth reporting on Agriculture, Education, the Environment, Health, and Politics, powered by Illinois Public Media.
RANTOUL — A central Illinois mother has filed a civil lawsuit against the Village of Rantoul saying her son was shot and killed by police in 2023 without lawful justification.
The wrongful death lawsuit filed in August 2025 by Amy Richardson claims that her son, 18-year-old Jordan Richardson, died due to excessive force after he had already complied with an officer’s orders to drop his gun.
In 2024, Amy Richardson filed a federal lawsuit, which has since been dropped, claiming Rantoul Police Sergeant Jerry King’s use of deadly force was unreasonable and violated her son’s constitutional rights. The new, amended lawsuit, filed in the Sixth Circuit Court of Illinois in August, says her son never pointed his firearm in the direction of King and had complied with orders to drop his gun.
Body-camera footage released by the Rantoul Police Department appears to show Richardson dropping his gun within a fraction of a second of being shot. The Champaign County State’s Attorney previously concluded King’s actions were legally justifiable.
Jason Marx, an attorney with the Chicago law firm Hale & Monico who is representing Amy Richardson, declined to comment due to pending litigation.
Rantoul Police didn’t respond to requests for comment, but in court filings, attorneys for the village have denied wrongdoing. They’ve also asserted, among other affirmative defenses, that the village is subject to “absolute immunity” because King’s actions were taken “in the apprehension of a dangerous suspect.”
What happened prior to Jordan Richardson’s death
On June 7, 2023, Rantoul Police Officer Rene Wissel located a car that had previously fled from officers, police reports said. Before Wissel arrested the 20-year-old driver, Jheremia McKown, Jordan Richardson ran from the vehicle carrying what police records show was a 9mm handgun with an extended magazine.
Police found two handguns and six bags of cannabis in the car, police reports said. In December 2024, McKown pleaded guilty to armed violence and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Rantoul Police Sergeant Jerry King drove to catch up with Richardson after he ran about a block away, police reports said. After telling Richardson to drop his gun multiple times, King shot and killed him.
Because the Village of Rantoul employed King at the time of the shooting, the lawsuit says Rantoul holds responsibility for Richardson’s death and the suffering he experienced before death.
Amy Richardson’s suit claims her son was unarmed at the time he was shot. The suit says he never pointed his firearm in the direction of King and never made any movement indicating he was going to point the firearm in the direction of King.
Driveway footage reviewed by IPM News and Invisible Institute shows Jordan Richardson running from officers with a gun in his right hand. After King exited his vehicle, he can be heard in footage from his body camera repeatedly telling Richardson to drop his weapon.
The footage shows Richardson fall, then turn toward King. King fires his weapon within a fraction of a second of when Richardson appears to drop his gun, which landed three to four feet from his body, according to an investigative report by Illinois State Police.
A switch from federal to state court
After Amy Richardson dropped her federal suit, she amended the claims before filing it in state court.
The federal lawsuit filed against the Village of Rantoul and Sgt. King claimed King violated Richardson’s Fourth Amendment rights — a claim that gets routinely stonewalled because of qualified immunity, said attorney Sam Jahangir, who has worked on civil rights cases but is not involved in this case.
Jahangir, visiting associate director of the Anderson Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Law, said under qualified immunity — a controversial doctrine created by the Supreme Court — plaintiffs need to prove the officer violated a “clearly established” federal right.
In many cases, that means finding an existing, near-copy of their case with a favorable ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court or in the same federal circuit, according to a 2024 report by Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm.
“Even if a police officer or another agent of the government did violate an individual’s rights, so long as it wasn’t clearly established through case law, etc., [they] cannot be held liable, and so the case doesn’t go to trial,” Jahangir said.
He said claims are often dropped in the filing of civil cases: Lawyers tend to “shoot for the moon” and then consolidate their claims as they get more information.
In a 2023 interview with Smile Politely, Amy Richardson said that Rantoul Police had been “on [her] son’s heels for months now.” She said police tackled Jordan when they responded to a scene where he had been the victim of an attempted shooting.
IPM News and Invisible Institute requested all police records from the Rantoul Police Department that involved Jordan Richardson since he turned 18. The request did not return documents that included him in an attempted shooting.
Community advocates want further accountability
In February 2023, four months before Sgt. King killed Jordan Richardson, Rantoul Police Officer Jose Aceves shot and killed 21-year-old Azaan Lee with his own gun during an investigation into a stolen vehicle. These back-to-back killings of young Black men were the first fatal shootings by the Rantoul Police Department in recent history, according to a review of Fatal Encounters and the Washington Post’s Fatal Force, two databases that tracked people killed during interactions with police between 2000 and 2024.
Champaign County State’s Attorney Julia Rietz declined to bring charges against either Aceves or King for their uses of deadly force.
According to the preliminary report, Rietz determined Aceves firing his weapon at Lee as he fled from police was legally justifiable. She determined the legality of Aceves’ use of deadly force before the Illinois State Police concluded their investigation, she said in the report.
Internal investigations by the Rantoul Police Department determined both Aceves and King acted within the department’s policies, though Officer Wissel was faulted for not de-escalating the situation with McKown.
Despite clearing the officers who killed Richardson and Lee, the department’s Use of Force Review Board recommended further training. As of 2024, those trainings had not been implemented.
Aceves resigned just over a month after killing Lee and was shortly after hired by the Champaign County Sheriff’s Office. However, he did not complete his training period, and state records show he is not currently employed as a law enforcement officer in Illinois.
King remains employed with Rantoul Police.
After Aceves and King were cleared of wrongdoing by the Champaign County State’s Attorney, community members protested, calling for independent investigations into the killings and for the officers to be arrested.
Derek Briles, an organizer with the Champaign-Urbana chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, said that while families who receive jury awards or settlements after suing the police deserve them, these payouts do not change the system.
“What we know it’s not going to do is: It’s not going to bring Jordan back. It’s not going to bring Azaan back,” he said. “Instead of holding the cops accountable, instead of sending them to jail, removing them from their positions, and reforming criminal justice in this country, we just pay [the families] money, right?”
Briles said he wants real accountability for police. And he hopes people don’t forget Richardson and Lee.
“It’s been over two years now, and I think people don’t remember. They are forgetting,” Briles said.
“I know it’s not necessarily pleasant to dwell on all the bad parts of life, but we can’t just glaze over them… If we forget about Jordan, if we forget about Azaan, we’re forgetting about a piece of ourselves that deserves justice, and we should not let that happen.”