A Jury Said Shooting Apollo Violated the Constitution. Qualified Immunity Meant Burmaster Owed Nothing.

Apollo was sixteen weeks old — a Catahoula puppy, twenty-two pounds. On April 10, 2021, he came down the front porch stairs of his New Orleans home, barking, tail wagging.

Officer Derrick Burmaster of the New Orleans Police Department was there in response to a noise/domestic complaint. As the puppy came down the steps, Burmaster shot him three times in the neck and chest.

Apollo died in his owner's arms.

Those facts — the twenty-two pounds, the wagging tail, the three rounds into a sixteen-week-old body — did not go unexamined, because Apollo's owners refused to let them. They sued Burmaster and the city in 2022, and when the case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the court allowed it to go to a jury.

In June 2025 — more than four years after Apollo died — a federal jury heard the case and found that Burmaster had violated the owners' constitutional rights when he shot their puppy.

Then qualified immunity did what qualified immunity does.

The jury granted Burmaster qualified immunity, the doctrine that shields government officials from personal liability even for conduct found unconstitutional. The finding of a constitutional violation stood on the record. The consequence of it, for the man who fired, was erased.

What survived was a claim under state negligence law — against the city, not the officer. The court ordered the city to pay about $10,400.

The arithmetic

Set it out plainly. A sixteen-week-old puppy, shot three times coming down his own porch steps with his tail wagging. Years of litigation. A federal appeals court ruling. A jury's finding that the shooting violated the United States Constitution. Total consequences: roughly $10,400 — owed by the taxpayers of New Orleans, not by Officer Burmaster, and owed under a state negligence theory, because the constitutional violation the jury actually found produced no liability at all. The record reports no departmental discipline against Burmaster.

This is qualified immunity operating as designed. A jury said, on the record and in a federal courtroom, that this officer violated the Constitution — and the doctrine ensured the verdict cost him nothing. Apollo's owners spent more than four years proving what happened on their porch. The proof was worth about $10,400, and not a dollar of it comes from the man who fired.