The Shooting of Eric Logan and Its Three Verdicts

2019–2023

In the early hours of June 16, 2019, Sergeant Ryan O'Neill, a nineteen-year veteran of the South Bend Police Department, was investigating a string of car break-ins — seven reported that night — in the parking lot of the Central High Apartments when he encountered Eric Logan, 54. O'Neill's account, the only eyewitness account that exists, was that Logan refused orders to drop a knife and advanced on him; O'Neill fired. Logan died. His body-worn and dashboard cameras had not been activated, and no security video captured the encounter. The shooting itself, as an offense record, belongs to Crime; what belongs here is the civic episode it set off — the process the city and the county built to judge it, the dispute over what that process found, and the three separate legal answers the case produced, which did not all point the same way.

The process was insulated by design. St. Joseph County Prosecutor Ken Cotter stepped aside in July 2019, and a special prosecutor, Ric Hertel of Ripley County, took the case. Mayor Buttigieg left the presidential campaign trail, and at a town hall on June 23, 2019, residents — including Logan's mother — confronted him in public; the episode followed his candidacy in the national press for the rest of the year as the defining test of his record on race. The Logan family, represented by attorney Brian Coffman, disputed the officer's account from the start and maintained that Logan had thrown the knife away before he was shot. Vigils and marches followed the shooting; Black Lives Matter South Bend organized in the open.

On March 6, 2020, Hertel announced his findings: the shooting was justified — the state could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the force was not justified, and his report grounded the conclusion in "the sharp-edged knife in the right hand of Mr. Logan." The family's disagreement was and remains part of the record: the investigation record, as later summarized in the civil litigation, included the fact that testing found neither Logan's DNA nor his fingerprints on the knife, a fact the family treated as corroboration and the courts treated as no contradiction. Black Lives Matter South Bend publicly decried the decision. The same day, on a whistleblower's complaint unrelated to the shooting, Hertel charged O'Neill — who had resigned from the department in July 2019 — with official misconduct, ghost employment, and public indecency, the last arising from an alleged on-duty solicitation of sex in uniform, in his cruiser, on May 16, 2019. O'Neill pleaded guilty to ghost employment on September 8, 2020, the other counts were dropped, and on October 27, 2020, he was sentenced to two years' probation and barred from ever again seeking or accepting public employment.

The civil case ran the full federal course. Logan's estate sued the city and O'Neill under Section 1983 on June 26, 2019. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants (Logan v. City of South Bend, 564 F. Supp. 3d 719, N.D. Ind. 2021), holding that "this record offers no proof of different facts"; the Seventh Circuit affirmed (Estate of Eric Jack Logan v. City of South Bend, 50 F.4th 614, October 3, 2022), reasoning that litigation "must be resolved on the evidence that exists"; and the Supreme Court denied the estate's petition for certiorari on April 17, 2023 (No. 22-615). The three answers thus stand together in the record: the special prosecutor found the shooting justified; the civil courts found no triable case against the officer or the city; and the officer's own service ended in a felony plea arising from separate conduct the same investigation season brought to light. The family's account was never adopted by any of the three — and was never withdrawn, either.

Sources:

1. Office of Special Prosecutor Ric Hertel, findings and report, March 6, 2020
2. Logan v. City of South Bend, 564 F. Supp. 3d 719 (N.D. Ind. 2021); Estate of Eric Jack Logan v. City of South Bend, 50 F.4th 614 (7th Cir. 2022)
3. Supreme Court of the United States, order list of April 17, 2023 — certiorari denied, No. 22-615
4. South Bend Tribune and Associated Press, coverage of the shooting, the June 23, 2019 town hall, the March 2020 findings, and the O'Neill plea and sentence (2019–2020)
5. State v. O'Neill (St. Joseph County) — guilty plea, September 8, 2020; sentence, October 27, 2020