TOLEDO, Ohio — Eljay Crisp-Carr, the 20-year-old Toledo man who spent 141 days in the Lucas County jail accused of being one of two gunmen in the June 6 Old West End Festival shooting that wounded 12 people, has sued the city, the county and the officials who prosecuted him, seeking $20 million in a federal civil-rights lawsuit that alleges police built the case on a fabricated identification and sat on tips pointing to a different shooter. The lawsuit, filed November 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio by Crisp-Carr and his mother, April Carr, is the major new development since prosecutors dropped all of his charges on October 30 and he walked free — the dismissal Awaaz Punjab reported at the time.

Source: WTOL / WTVG 13 Action News, via Front Page Detectives (Nov. 9)

The complaint names four defendants: the City of Toledo, Lucas County, Toledo police Detective Danielle Mooney — the lead detective who testified against Crisp-Carr at his June bond hearing — and Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates. It seeks at least $10 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages. The prosecutor's office said it does not comment on pending litigation, and no response from Toledo police or the city was reported.

Source: WTOL, via Front Page Detectives (Nov. 9)

What the lawsuit alleges

According to the complaint, officials built the case on a fabricated identification, ignored exculpatory evidence and suppressed tips pointing to a different suspect. It says two Crime Stoppers tips named a person referred to as “Individual A,” and that police did not disclose him to the court or the grand jury. Prosecutors themselves acknowledged in an October 27 filing that a Crime Stoppers tipster's information was exculpatory and “implicates a potential co-defendant,” while refusing to identify the tipster, saying naming the person would endanger them and compromise the investigation. These are allegations in a civil complaint; none has been tested in court.

Source: Lake Erie Inquiry (court-record account, Oct. 31, updated Nov. 8)

The lawsuit says surveillance video never showed the gunman's face, and that cell records and witnesses placed Crisp-Carr about two and a half blocks away, beside his pickup truck, which had run out of gas. His attorneys said he was on a different section of Glenwood Avenue, on the other side of I-75, several blocks from the festival. A Toledo police camera fixes the first shot at 5:35:43 p.m. on June 6 at Delaware Avenue and Robinwood Avenue; the defence's October 12 dismissal motion says an FBI analysis of Crisp-Carr's phone shows calls nine seconds before that shot and 29 seconds after it, running through a cell-tower sector serving Glenwood Avenue rather than the festival. About 22 minutes later, the motion says, a doorbell camera on Glenwood recorded Crisp-Carr dressed in red, asking for help with a gas can because his truck had run out of gas — while the gunman on the police camera wore all black and a black Nike ski mask.

How the case against him was built — and how it unravelled

Crisp-Carr was arrested on June 11, five days after the shooting, and a judge ordered him held without bond a week later. He and Ka'Nye Taylor were indicted on June 24. At the June 18 bond hearing, Detective Mooney testified that a .45-calibre Glock found in another person's home was matched to shell casings at the scene, that Crisp-Carr gave shifting accounts of who owned the gun and how it had left his possession, that texts from him after the shooting demanded the gun back and turned threatening, and that a Nike ski mask found in his truck looked like one gunman's. Under cross-examination, she said DNA results on the gun were not back, that she had not seen Crisp-Carr holding it in a May video, and that she had no witness to the gun changing hands at his truck.

The state's theory then moved. On October 28 — two days before the dismissal, and two days after prosecutors had asked Judge Lori Olender to reject the defence's dismissal motion — the prosecution changed its account: instead of saying Crisp-Carr was a gunman, it said he provided a gun used in the shooting. On October 30, Jennifer Liptack-Sutphin, chief of criminal prosecution in the county prosecutor's office, told the judge that “new and developing evidence” called for dismissal. Judge Olender dismissed the case “without prejudice,” meaning prosecutors may refile, denied Crisp-Carr's motion to end it for good, and also dismissed a probation violation filed after his arrest. Prosecutor Bates said her office had told defence attorney Alex Bodiford in September of discovery that “may support his defense,” and Toledo police Sgt. Mohamad Nasser said the dismissal followed “new developments in the evidence” and that the investigation remains active.

Crisp-Carr has said plainly that he was misidentified and was not at the festival. “They told me I was a monster. They just incriminated me,” he told WTVG. His mother, April Carr — who, in earlier reporting, said she is living with stage 4 cancer after previously beating the disease twice, and who had warned that “a whole bunch of lawsuits coming” — said of people who had accused her son online: “Sometimes jumping to conclusions have you looking like a donkey.”

The shooting, and the cases that continue

The June 6 shooting erupted shortly after 5:30 p.m. during the Old West End Festival, Toledo's large neighbourhood festival; police say two people fired. Twelve people were taken to hospitals — six males and six females, per the Toledo police incident report — and a 13th victim, a 16-year-old girl, was not on the report's hospital list. A 17-year-old was arrested on June 9, accused of driving the gun away from the scene rather than firing it; prosecutors later sought to try the teen as an adult, and the teen is due back in juvenile court on November 20. No one is now charged as the second gunman.

Ka'Nye Taylor, 20, the other man charged as a gunman, remains jailed without bond and was due in court on Monday, November 9 — the same day this lawsuit was reported. Taylor was arrested in Columbus on June 17; he had been shot in the hand. At a July 7 bond hearing, prosecutors presented a police-camera still that Judge Olender wrote shows Taylor “with a gun pointed and ready to shoot.” His case, CR2026-00830 in Lucas County Common Pleas Court, is separate from Crisp-Carr's, whose case was CR2026-00829. Taylor's charges are allegations he has not been convicted of.

Why this case matters beyond Toledo

The lawsuit puts a price on a question that reaches far beyond one festival: how an identification is made in the first chaotic days after a mass shooting, and what happens when the state's own records — phone-location analysis, camera timestamps, clothing on doorbell video — point somewhere else. Crisp-Carr's lawyers say the damages request is tied to lasting harm from nearly five months in jail on 56 counts, and to punishing what they argue were purposeful mistakes. For police and prosecutors, the case will test how much of the early investigation — the gun match, the ski mask, the texts, the undisclosed tips — was evidence, and how much was momentum.

What happens next

The City of Toledo, Lucas County, Detective Mooney and Prosecutor Bates must now respond to the federal complaint in the Northern District of Ohio; the prosecutor's office has already said it will not comment on pending litigation. Because the criminal dismissal was without prejudice, prosecutors legally may refile charges against Crisp-Carr, though they have given no indication they will. In the criminal cases that remain, Taylor's proceedings continue in Lucas County and the juvenile's case returns to court on November 20. The police investigation into the festival shooting — including who the second gunman was — remains active, Sgt. Nasser said.