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The widow of a 62-year-old Henrietta man shot and killed by Monroe County sheriff’s deputies in a motel bathroom in August filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Friday. The suit alleges the deputies opened fire about 14 seconds after he told them he could not hear them.
Bonnie Kase filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in Rochester against Monroe County, Sheriff Todd Baxter, and Deputies Christopher Piper and Nichole Gorman. She is suing individually and as administrator of the estate of her husband, Gregory Allen Kase.
Gregory Kase had moderate-to-severe hearing loss in both ears, wore hearing aids and relied on lip reading, the complaint states. He also had major depression, anxiety and a history of post-traumatic stress disorder.
On Aug. 9, he checked into Room 113 at the Super 8 on Lehigh Station Road and told his wife he was suicidal and had cut his wrists, according to the complaint. She called 911.
“Gregory told these deputies exactly what was wrong: he could not hear them,” Elliot Shields of Roth & Roth LLP, the family’s attorney, said in a statement. “Fourteen seconds later, they shot him.”
In an interview Friday, Shields said the family wants compensation and changes in how deputies are trained. “Hopefully it would lead to reforms that would prevent this from ever occurring again,” he said.
The complaint builds its timeline from captions on a video the Sheriff’s Office released Aug. 20. The video, just under seven minutes long, combines body-camera footage from both deputies with dispatch audio and a briefing Chief Deputy Michael Fowler gave at the scene. (The footage shows the encounter that ended in Kase’s death and contains material some viewers may find disturbing.)
Piper called Kase by name at about 4:08:43 p.m., then kicked the door open and approached the bathroom with his handgun drawn, the complaint states. Gorman was directly behind him, also with her gun drawn.
Kase was naked and in the bathtub, holding a box cutter he had been using to hurt himself, the suit says. He answered “what” repeatedly to the deputies’ commands. At about 4:09:13 p.m., he said, “I can’t hear you.”
The deputies kept shouting commands and did not use gestures or other visual cues, the complaint alleges. Nor, it says, did they request the Crisis Intervention Team the sheriff’s office created in March for calls involving threatened suicide and self-harm.
Fowler said at an Aug. 20 news conference that mental health staff do not respond alongside deputies and had not yet been requested, which he called “appropriate for our procedures.”
Both deputies fired multiple times at about 4:09:26 p.m. That was roughly 44 seconds after Piper first called to Kase.
“Gregory was not attacking either deputy,” the complaint states.
Authorities have described the moment differently. Fowler said Kase kept advancing on the deputies with the blade pointed at them after being told several times to drop it.
“Mr. Kase made a choice,” Fowler said. “His actions dictated how this incident ended. He had repeated opportunities to put the knife down or stay in the bathroom.”
The state attorney general’s Office of Special Investigation, which by law investigates deaths caused by police, said in a preliminary account Sept. 2 that Kase did not comply and moved toward the deputies with a knife.
Baxter, through Monroe County’s communications office, did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
One allegation from the family’s August notice of claim does not appear in the lawsuit: that Bonnie Kase told a 911 operator her husband could not hear. The city of Rochester, which operates the 911 center jointly with Monroe County, told WXXI News in August that recordings of her three calls contain no such statement.
Asked whether the deputies were told Kase had hearing loss, Fowler said the released video includes everything that went out over the radio. The dispatch audio in it is labeled as edited for time.
The suit accuses the county and Baxter of failing to prepare deputies for encounters they were certain to have.
It cites a 2012 study by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is in Henrietta, that concluded the Rochester area has the nation’s largest per-capita population of working-age residents with hearing loss.
Despite that, the complaint alleges, the sheriff’s office did not require training on recognizing hearing loss and had no written policy on communicating with people who cannot hear. Those allegations are made “upon information and belief,” meaning the plaintiff does not have direct knowledge.
The Beacon requested the sheriff’s office’s policies and training materials, along with dispatch records and the deputies’ disciplinary files, on Aug. 21 under the state Freedom of Information Law. The county extended its response deadline to Nov. 18 and had released nothing as of Friday. Bonnie Kase is in state court seeking to force the release of records on the shooting that the county denied her, citing the attorney general’s investigation.
Piper had been sued twice over his use of force before the shooting, in cases stemming from a 2023 call to a home and a 2025 motorcycle pursuit. Both are pending, name Baxter as a defendant and were filed by Roth & Roth. The Kase complaint alleges Baxter ordered no retraining, added supervision or discipline for Piper and kept him on unrestricted patrol.
The suit alleges excessive force, disability discrimination and wrongful death, among other claims. Bonnie Kase seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and a jury trial.
The defendants have not yet responded to the complaint. The attorney general’s investigation remains open, according to the office’s website, and the sheriff’s office said in August it was conducting an internal review. Both deputies were placed on administrative leave after the shooting; the sheriff’s office did not respond Friday to a question about their current status.
Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and a former Democrat and Chronicle reporter. He writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York at Cleveland Prost and publishes investigative pieces at The Genesee Signal.
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