After an eight-day civil trial, a jury will place a dollar amount on the physical and emotional pain caused by two bullets.

Attorneys representing six plaintiffs injured after former Denver Police Department officer Brandon Ramos shot in the direction of a late-night LoDo crowd in July 2022 asked jurors to award over $13 million in damages to their clients during the trial’s closing arguments Thursday.

As Denver District Court Judge Andrew McCallin presided over the proceedings from the bench of his second-floor courtroom, naturally lit from the mid-morning light seeping in through the room’s 20-some-foot-tall west-facing windows, attorney Omeed Azmoudeh gave jurors his argument for why Ramos should be forced to pay that amount of restitution.

During the hearing, attorneys alleged that two bullets, both fired by Ramos in the direction of then-21-year-old Jordan Waddy, a suspect who had started a fight outside Larimer Beer Hall and had a gun in his possession, struck six bystanders that night — Alexander Bailey, Ayla Bersagel, Mark Bess, Angelica Rey, Willis Small and Yekalo Weldehiwet.

“This is about them,” Azmoudeh said. “Six young people who did nothing wrong. Six young people who were just being. Six young people whose lives were forever changed in an instant by a decision that should have obviously never been made.”

The defense, led by attorney Peter Doherty, argued that Ramos was doing his duty as a peace officer and was trying to protect the public from greater harm.

“The acting behaviors of Mr. Waddy were not of someone who was just going to give up,” Doherty said. “My client admits that he fired at least once, my client admits that he was faced in this direction.”

The shooting was spurred by a fight involving Waddy outside the beer hall just a few minutes after 1:30 a.m. Police confronted him after the fight. Body camera footage shows Waddy taking his hands out of his pockets and putting them in the air, walking back toward the crowded sidewalk.

But police said he did not comply with commands to come toward them, and as Waddy reached into his waistband and pulled out a 10mm Rock Island M1911 A2, officers deemed that he posed a “significant threat,” according to the affidavit for his arrest. Officers then claimed he pointed the gun at them — footage shows he was actually trying to throw it away — and fired several shots at the man, hitting him and six other bystanders.

Ramos was the only one of three officers who opened fire to face charges in connection with the shooting. Officers Kenneth Rowland and Meagan Lieberson also fired rounds during the incident.

“In the milliseconds that we’re dealing with here, Jordan Waddy has taken the gun out and thrown it to the side, and then Officer Rowland’s four shots follow,” Doherty said. “The theory has been posed that it is OK for four out of five officers to see a threat, but wrong for Officer Ramos to see the exact same interaction, to see the same threat.”

Doherty continued to say that Ramos was following his duty as an officer to dispel what he believed to be an active threat, and that the benefit of hindsight allows for people to more deeply analyze actions he made in the heat of a tense moment.

Azmoudeh disagreed with Doherty’s assessment.

“He reasonably believed it was necessary to shoot his gun into a crowd, that no other reasonable means of defense were available other than shooting his gun into a crowd,” Azmoudeh said. “They want you to think this case was like Columbine, like that was the decision Officer Ramos was facing.”

Ramos was indicted by a Denver grand jury in January 2023 on 14 different counts, including reckless second-degree assault, third-degree knowing or reckless assault, third-degree assault with negligence using a deadly weapon and five counts of reckless endangerment.

A year later, he took a deal that dropped all 14 counts against him in exchange for a guilty plea to a third-degree assault charge. The deal also gave him probation without jail time on the condition that he could never be a peace officer in the state again.

Near the end of his argument Thursday, Azmoudeh highlighted surveillance footage showing Small, one of the plaintiffs, approaching a group of women before turning around just before the shots rang out.

“A moment later, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” Azmoudeh said, emphatically hitting his hand on the lectern for each shot. “Instantly, that moment turns into chaos, an innocent night is turned into a nightmare.”

The six-person jury took recess to begin their deliberations around noon on Thursday and did not return with a verdict before the end of the day.

Denver Gazette reporter Sage Kelley and former Denver Gazette reporter Carol McKinley contributed to this report.