City to pay $3.3 million to settle Molly’s Pub lawsuits

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Defense attorney Joel Daniels and Jeffrey Basil. Photo courtesy of WKBW 7 News.

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It’s been more than 11 years since Jeffrey Basil, bar manager of the now-defunct Molly’s Pub on Main Street, pushed William Sager down a flight of stairs, then enlisted off-duty Buffalo police officers working security for the bar to try to cover up what he’d done.

Sager, 28, suffered a traumatic brain injury and died on July 31, 2014, after two-and-a-half months in a coma. Basil was sentenced to 18 years in prison for manslaughter in 2015. 

The following year, Robert Eloff, one of the off-duty cops, resigned from the force. He was sentenced to three months in prison and a year of supervised release for arresting and handcuffing Sager’s friend, Donald Hall, that night. Hall had tried to come to Sager’s assistance outside the bar, where Eloff and others had propped the injured man, also handcuffed, against a wall.

Now, two long-running lawsuits that arose from the incident are approaching a resolution.

 The city’s law department this week asked the Common Council to approve a $3 million settlement to Sager’s family. The city’s lawyers are also asking for approval to pay $290,000 to Hall — compensation for violations of his civil rights, as well as the trauma of witnessing the fatal attack on his friend.

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Lawmakers also were asked this week to approve two other police misconduct lawsuit settlements:

• $100,000 to Dylan and Ethan Pray, for injuries suffered in 2021 when their car collided with a police SUV driven by Patrol Officer Matthew Serafini. Serafini and his partner were responding to a report of shots fired in the Jasper Parrish public housing project. 
• $41,500 to Chevalier Jones, who in 2023 was beaten, then arrested, by Patrol Officers Patrick Garry, Jonathan Hanover and others outside a Sycamore Street convenience store. Jones had objected when officers shone a flashlight into his car, where his daughter and her mother were waiting for him. The argument led to obstruction charges, which were eventually dropped.

In all, the police misconduct settlements before the Council this week total more than $3.4 million.

The city has already paid more than $1.2 million to settle lawsuits this fiscal year, which began July 1. Most of that — $1.1 million — went to settle yet another police misconduct lawsuit, that one filed in 2018 by East Side resident James Kistner.

The city has allotted $4.3 million for settlements in its current budget year, which runs through June 30. That means that, with seven months to go, the budget line is already in deficit.

Fillmore District lawmaker Mitch Nowakowski, chair of the Council’s Finance Committee, told Investigative Post the city “has way underestimated” the cost of settling claims against the city in the current budget year.

“Moving forward, our Corporation Counsel needs to exude extreme fortitude in planning out where these cases stand … and, if a verdict or settlement is reached, how we pay for it,” he said. 

He added that city officials should also consider if it’s appropriate to borrow money to pay big settlements, rather than deplete city operating funds and incur year-end deficits. That has happened as recently as 2023, when the city borrowed $43 million to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of Chelsea Ellis, a pedestrian rendered paraplegic when Patrol Officer Branden Lowe struck her with his vehicle on his way to what turned out to be a false report of a stabbing.

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The budget line for paying claims is not so deep in the red as it was last year, when the city budgeted $4.4 million for lawsuit settlements and paid out $18.6 million. 

That figure was driven by two large settlements: 

• $6.5 million to Josue Ortiz, who spent more than a decade in prison for a 2004 double murder he didn’t commit. A panel of appellate judges determined a former Buffalo detective “in bad faith, fabricated” Ortiz’s confession.
• $8.7 million split between Darryl Boyd and John Walker, who spent to prison as teenagers for a 1976 murder. Their convictions were overturned in 2021 when a judge found prosecutors had withheld evidence at trial and investigators had “coerced vulnerable witnesses to provide false statements.” 

Buffalo got off easy. A jury this month ordered Erie County to pay $80 million to Boyd’s estate for its part in sending him to jail. (Boyd died of cancer in February.) In April, a different jury ordered the county to pay Walker $28 million. 

Absent the awards to Ortiz, Boyd and Walker, the amount of money the city budgeted for settling lawsuits would have been adequate. 

Instead, those settlements helped drive last year’s spending plan into an overall deficit of $14.8 million. To help balance the books, officials are looking to its emergency stabilization fund — the city’s “rainy day” money — which the city charter expressly forbids using to plug budget holes.

As for the current budget year, the red ink is likely to keep flowing. A lawsuit filed by the widow of Jason Arno, the firefighter killed in the March 1, 2023, fire at 743 Main Street. The case is scheduled to go to trial in January.

The Council referred the settlement for Sager, Hall and the others to its Claims Committee, which meets Dec. 17.

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Our next event is Dec. 12, an in-person interview with Mayor-Elect Sean Ryan