Kevin Cole was outside a Safeway in Sacramento in December 2019 with his dog, Nikki. A security guard at the store called the police about him — the record does not detail what the guard reported, only that the call concerned Cole, who was outside the store with his dog. Nikki's breed was never reported; what the record preserves is her name, her owner, and where the bullet fragments found her.
Officers arrived and tried to restrain Cole. Police said that as they did, Nikki became aggressive. An officer fired a single shot.
One bullet, discharged outside a grocery store, wounded three living beings. Fragments struck Nikki's rear leg. Fragments struck the security guard — the man who had made the call — in the leg. And fragments struck Kevin Cole in the face.
Nikki survived. So did Cole, and so did the guard. But tally what a single trigger pull produced: the dog the officer was aiming at was wounded; the complainant the police were there to assist was wounded; the man officers were physically restraining took bullet fragments to the face. Whether the dog was in fact aggressive exists in the record only as the police account — officers said she became aggressive — and no version from Cole appears alongside it in the record of the shooting itself.
The lawsuit
If the Sacramento Police Department conducted an internal review of the shot, the record does not mention it. No discipline was reported. The officer who fired was not publicly named.
The only accountability process visible in this case is the one Kevin Cole started himself. In March 2020, he sued the city, the police department, and the chief, alleging reckless discharge of a firearm, excessive force, false detention, and unreasonable seizure.
That is where the public record rests. A man stood outside a store with his dog; a security guard's phone call ended with fragments of a single police bullet in the man's face, the guard's leg, and the dog's rear leg. The department's contribution to the accounting, as far as the record shows, is silence. The lawsuit exists because one of the people wounded by the shot had to build the accountability mechanism himself.