A federal jury awarded $3 million Thursday, Feb. 26, to the daughter of an Air Force veteran whom two Los Angeles Police Department officers shot and seriously injured in 2022 while he was unarmed, according to the law firm that represented his daughter.

The jury decided that shots fired against Jermaine Petit weren’t needed to protect human life, according to Ivie McNeill Wyatt Purcell & Diggs and the Law Offices of Dale K. Galipo, which represented Petit’s daughter.

“This case was about confronting assumptions with facts,” said one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, Rodney S. Diggs, in a news release. “The jury saw what happened, rejected a narrative that wasn’t supported by the evidence, and affirmed that deadly force cannot be used without necessity.”

Los Angeles police officials declined to comment Thursday on the jury’s decision.

Petit was carrying a car part in his right hand on the day of the shooting, which he showed police, the plaintiff’s lawyers said.

One officer said, “It’s not a gun bro,” when he saw the car part before Petit walked away from police, his daughter’s lawyers said.

At that point, one of the officers fired twice at Petit from his patrol vehicle, which struck Petit in the jaw, and the other officer shot Petit once in the back as he was falling to the ground, Petit’s daughter’s lawyers said.

Neither officer warned Petit before shooting, the plaintiff’s lawyers said. Police alleged Petit turned toward them with the object and took a shooting stance, but videos disproved the claims, the plaintiff’s lawyers said.

After an investigation of the shooting, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office determined in April 2024 that the officers “fired their service weapons, reasonably believing, based on the totality of the circumstances, that deadly force was necessary to defend themselves and others against an imminent deadly threat.”

According to the report, officers responded to a dispatch call describing Petit as a transient carrying a gun and lighting trash on fire in a residential neighborhood.

Though Petit survived the shooting, he was found dead in his home in 2024. The cause of death was undetermined.