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Lawsuit over High Point man's shooting death settled for $4 million

Attorneys for the mother of a young man who was killed at a High Point funeral say their civil rights lawsuit has been settled.

Tenicka Shannon sued the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office and the detective who fatally shot her son, 18-year-old Fred Cox.

Last week, the case was settled in Greensboro’s Middle District federal court for $4 million. The shooting occurred in November 2020, during a time of racial reckoning over police killings. Cox died after a drive-by shooting following a funeral in High Point. 

Davidson County Detective Michael Shane Hill was at the service as part of an investigation into a homicide in that jurisdiction.

Attorneys for the Cox family say Cox was a volunteer during the funeral and was helping usher people to safety when he was shot. The Guilford County District Attorney's Office says there was no evidence that Cox fired a weapon.

No criminal charges were filed against the detective.

Cox’s death led to protests and calls for justice. It also caught the attention of Ben Crump, a nationally known civil rights attorney, who was part of the legal team.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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