Siddhartha H. Rathod

The Car on the Mountain Road

Christian Glass called 911 because his car was stuck on a rocky road. Seventy minutes later, a deputy fired into the driver’s seat. Siddhartha Rathod made the response of every agency at the scene part of the civil resolution—and made intervention itself a term of reform.

Civil-rights litigation begins after government authority has already been exercised. The officer has acted, the agency has issued its account, and the family confronts doctrines that can end a claim before a jury sees the full encounter. Across those cases, Rathod focuses on the moment when another person could have interrupted the harm: a deputy beside a car, a driver on a school bus, an officer watching colleagues use force, or a city reviewing what its cameras recorded.

Rathod looks beyond the individual officer to the system behind the encounter. He examines command, training, reporting, discipline, indemnification, and why several officials at the same scene failed to intervene effectively.

The Call for Help

On the night of June 10, 2022, twenty-two-year-old Christian Glass was returning from a geology trip when his SUV became lodged on rocks near Silver Plume, Colorado. He called 911 for roadside assistance. Glass sounded frightened and at times paranoid. He told the dispatcher that knives, a hammer, and a rubber mallet were inside the vehicle and offered to throw the tools out when officers arrived.

Responding deputies told him to leave the objects where they were and ordered him out. Glass removed his keys and placed them on the dashboard but remained behind the locked doors. He made a heart with his hands. He prayed that officers would not break the window. Personnel from Clear Creek County, Georgetown, Idaho Springs, the Colorado State Patrol, and the Division of Gaming gathered on the mountain road.

After approximately seventy minutes, officers breached the passenger window. They fired beanbag rounds and used a Taser after Glass picked up a small knife. Clear Creek County Deputy Andrew Buen then fired into the vehicle, killing him. Glass had reported no crime. The disabled car that prompted his request for assistance remained stationary.

The sheriff’s first public release described Glass as armed and attempting to stab an officer. Body-camera recordings preserved the preceding hour: the call for help, the keys on the dashboard, the repeated demands that he exit, the arrival of several agencies, and the decision to force entry. Clear Creek County later acknowledged that its initial release did not accurately describe the encounter and that the lethal force was inconsistent with reasonable policing.

Seven Chances to Speak

Rathod represented Sally and Simon Glass. The civil claims reached beyond the deputy who pulled the trigger to the officers, agencies, and command decisions that sustained the escalation. Seven officers were present when the window was breached. A Clear Creek County supervisor participated remotely and authorized removal from the vehicle.

Colorado law now imposes liability on a peace officer who causes a deprivation of state constitutional rights, including by failing to intervene. The Glass agreements put that duty into practice. Rathod’s observation—that any one of seven officers could have stopped the course simply by speaking—identified both the smallest available intervention and the collective failure the settlement addressed.

Four governmental entities contributed to the $19 million announced in May 2023: $10 million from Clear Creek County, $5 million from Georgetown, $3 million from Colorado, and $1 million from Idaho Springs. The allocation followed the map of the roadside. Each contributor employed personnel involved in the encounter or its command.

Reform Written into the Settlement

The Glass family negotiated obligations directed to failures visible on the recordings. Clear Creek County agreed to create a dedicated crisis-response team and certify patrol officers in crisis intervention. New recruits would hear from Sally and Simon Glass. A public park would be selected with the parents and dedicated in Christian’s name.

Colorado agreed to develop a virtual-reality scenario based on the encounter for multi-agency de-escalation training. Active-bystandership instruction for state troopers and gaming officers would open with a video from Glass’s parents explaining the duty to intervene. The state also undertook to display Christian’s artwork in public buildings.

The agencies issued public corrections. Idaho Springs acknowledged poor judgment, poor tactics, and the absence of a clear command structure. Georgetown disavowed the inaccurate initial account. Clear Creek County apologized and recognized that its officers had failed to meet expectations when Glass called for assistance.

Criminal proceedings remained separate. Supervisor Kyle Gould pleaded guilty to failure to intervene and failure to report excessive force, received probation, and surrendered his peace-officer certification. Buen was convicted of reckless endangerment in his first trial and criminally negligent homicide in a second. In April 2025, the court imposed the maximum three-year prison term followed by two years of parole.

Colorado’s State Civil-Rights Claim

Colorado’s 2020 Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act created a state action for violations of rights secured by the Colorado Constitution. The statute expressly includes failure to intervene, removes qualified immunity as a defense, excludes the ordinary limits of the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act, provides fees to a prevailing plaintiff, and establishes rules for employer indemnification.

The law changed the choices facing a civil-rights plaintiff. A federal claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 can place the action in federal court and encounter qualified-immunity doctrine. A state tort claim can trigger an early governmental-immunity hearing with consequences for cost and proof. Section 13-21-131 supplies a different route, but counsel still has to select claims, defendants, forum, experts, and evidence with precision.

Rathod has described those cases as filled with procedural landmines: motions to dismiss, summary judgment, removal, immunity, and costly expert disputes. The 2025 LoDo trial showed how Colorado’s new state civil-rights law worked when a local jury received the complete use-of-force record.

Six Bystanders at Closing Time

In the early hours of July 17, 2022, Denver officers confronted an armed man outside the Larimer Beer Hall while bars emptied into Lower Downtown. Two officers fired from the front. Officer Brandon Ramos fired twice from the side, toward a place where a crowd stood behind the man. Six bystanders were wounded.

Several body cameras and a city HALO camera recorded the event, but the devices captured different frames per second. The trial team reconstructed timing across those recordings. One image became central: Ramos’s flashlight pointed away from the suspect as he fired, evidence bearing on where he was looking and what danger he could reasonably have perceived.

A grand jury concluded that Ramos was not in immediate danger when he fired and had disregarded the risk to the people behind his target. He later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor third-degree assault, received eighteen months of probation, and became ineligible to serve as a Colorado peace officer.

Rathod’s firm represented Yekalo Weldehiwet, Bailey Alexander, and Willis Small IV; John Lee, Anthony Viorst, and their teams represented the other plaintiffs. Rathod and Lee placed much of the eight-day trial in the hands of younger lawyers who had prepared the video, witness, and damages record. After one day of deliberation in October 2025, the jury found Ramos liable and awarded the six plaintiffs more than $19.75 million.

Each person’s physical and emotional injury received a separate valuation.

Intervention at the Jail Door

Jamal Hunter’s case began inside Denver’s Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center. Hunter alleged that a deputy encouraged other detainees to attack him, turned off the lights, and ignored his screams while he was beaten and scalded. The assault caused second- and third-degree burns across much of his genital area and a broken nose. Less than two weeks later, surveillance video recorded deputies choking and using a Taser on him.

Rathod, Qusair Mohamedbhai, and Arash Jahanian represented Hunter in federal court. Rathod argued that the city’s responsibility extended beyond the individual deputy to its customs governing protection, force, investigation, and the defense of misconduct claims. Judge John Kane considered the allegations serious enough to request a federal investigation into Denver’s public-safety practices.

The 2014 resolution provided $3.25 million and required independent review of both the sheriff’s department and the city attorney’s office. Hunter’s counsel obtained a court-approved agreement while Denver was confronting wider failures in jail supervision and accountability.

Denver’s Withheld Camera Footage

Five years before the LoDo verdict, Rathod was already building a civil-rights case frame by frame from a city camera. Kelly Boren, Sharelle Thomas, Ana Ortega, and Kristal Carrillo alleged that Denver officers struck, shoved, handcuffed, and pepper-sprayed them outside the Denver Diner in July 2009. The women also alleged that officers falsified accounts and that the city prosecuted them despite what the recording showed.

A High Activity Location Observation camera captured the incident. The footage was not released until nearly two years later. Rathod, Mohamedbhai, and Jahanian interviewed dozens of witnesses and reviewed more than one hundred thousand pages of discovery. Their municipal-liability theory reached beyond the two officers to Denver’s handling of complaints, force investigations, and discipline.

The federal court allowed the municipal claim to continue toward trial based on evidence supporting an alleged custom of failing to investigate complaints promptly and discipline officers properly. The case settled for $360,000. Denver later overhauled its police disciplinary-hearing structure.

Rathod and his colleagues translated that experience into scholarship. Their Denver University Law Review article examined the difficulty of enforcing civil rights against a municipality under Monell and the need to connect individual harm to policy, custom, notice, causation, and an effective remedy.

The Car as the Only Weapon

Jessica “Jessie” Hernandez was seventeen when Denver officers fired from the side of the car she was driving in January 2015. Her family’s civil case used force analysis, accident reconstruction, and ballistics to contest the proposition that the officers faced an immediate deadly threat when they fired.

Rathod represented the family in the federal civil-rights action. The 2017 resolution totaled $999,999 and carried public terms beyond payment. Denver trained officers under a revised policy barring gunfire at a moving vehicle when the vehicle itself is the only asserted deadly weapon. A Hernandez family representative received a place in the community process reviewing use-of-force policy.

The city also formalized a rule against proactively releasing unrelated criminal-history material about a person involved in an officer shooting. The term addressed what happens after force is used: whether the first public account explains the shooting or shifts attention to the person who was killed.

The School Bus and the Silent Witness

Shiva Rai was a twenty-year-old student with severe autism. He was nonverbal, had extremely limited communication, and depended on caretakers for basic needs. A bus aide physically and emotionally abused him over approximately six months. The bus driver was the adult positioned to see the conduct and report it.

Rathod represented the Rai family. Because the student lacked the language to describe the abuse, the case treated silence itself as part of the injury. The driver’s duty was concrete: she was the only immediate channel through which the conduct could reach parents, school officials, and law enforcement.

The St. Vrain Valley School District approved a $3.85 million settlement in 2017 and implemented reforms intended to protect other students. Criminal proceedings also produced sentences for the aide and driver. For the family, the central result was an enforceable change in the system responsible for transporting a person who could not summon help with words.

Elijah McClain and the Scale of Accountability

Rathod represented Sheneen McClain in the civil litigation arising from the death of her son Elijah. The twenty-three-year-old massage therapist was walking home in Aurora when officers stopped him, restrained him, and placed him in a carotid hold. Paramedics administered ketamine. He suffered cardiac arrest and was later declared brain-dead.

Aurora resolved the civil claims for $15 million in November 2021. Rathod emphasized that allocation between Elijah’s parents remained a separate proceeding and that Sheneen McClain would exchange the entire payment for one more day with her son.

The civil case compensated the family. Separately, a state investigation, a consent decree, and Colorado’s ketamine restrictions addressed police and fire practices, medical restraint, supervision, and transparency.

Military Service, Trial Practice, and Teaching

Rathod served as a Marine Corps captain before law school and began his legal career as a public defender. He has since tried more than fifty jury cases, taught trial advocacy through the National Institute for Trial Advocacy since 2011, and served as adjunct faculty at the University of Colorado School of Law.

Rathod teaches trial advocacy and civil-rights law with particular attention to records showing how an agency operated: policies, supervision, complaint histories, training, command decisions, and the remedies available after an unlawful use of authority.

His cases have examined roadside encounters, jail safety, crowd-control shootings, school transportation, and police use of force against moving vehicles.