The video attached to this story aired on Sept. 9, 2025.
AUSTIN (KXAN) — The city of Austin filed a motion Monday to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a woman who was shot in the eye during a shootout between Austin Police officers and a suspect in 2023.
The shooting happened outside of The Soho Lounge on Sixth Street, late at night on Dec. 16, 2023.
The bar refused to let in a man who had a gun, and officers in the area approached. As they did, the man “pulled out a firearm and pointed it in the direction of officers and innocent bystanders,” said Robin Henderson at the time, who was serving as Austin’s interim police chief.
Officers shot and killed the man, who also fired his gun, Henderson had said.
The exchange of gunfire injured three bystanders, one of whom was the lawsuit’s plaintiff, Nakole Curry. A bullet hit her right eye and caused permanent blindness to the 24-year-old U.S. Army veteran and mom.
“I was handing [bar staff] my ID card, and the next thing I know, I woke up in the hospital,” she told KXAN previously. “It literally happened in like the snap of a finger.”
Curry filed her lawsuit in the Austin division of U.S. District Court on Sept. 3. She named the city, APD, the bar and 10 unnamed officers who were involved in the shooting.
The Soho Lounge has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit. KXAN reached out to the bar’s owner on Wednesday for comment and will update this story when received.
Attorneys for the city wrote in their Monday motion that Curry’s lawsuit failed to “to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.” They denied claims that the city and APD failed to properly train its officers in use of force in a crowded area, de-escalation, crowd control and in limitations on the use of deadly force.
“There is no dispute that officers discharged their weapons after the individual pulled a gun from his waistband,” the city’s motion states. “There is no allegation of facts plausibly showing that some City policy or practice of inadequate training and deliberate indifference by the City were the moving force behind the specific incident of alleged excessive use of force.”
The city also responded that the lawsuit lacks the necessary “specificity” about which of APD’s training policies were inadequate, citing a 2020 case involving Austin ISD. The plaintiff in that case won damages related to several claims, but the court denied her claims about AISD training policies for lack of specific information.
“There is no specific identification of what the City of Austin improperly trained its officers to do as related to this specific incident,” the motion states later about the 2023 shooting.
While not referenced in Curry’s lawsuit, a March 2023 review of APD training policy found that APD’s Academy Curriculum Review Committee “functioned for most of its existence without a clearly defined mission and scope, which hampered its effectiveness from the beginning.”
The lawsuit lists four APD cases between 2017 and 2020 as “incidents of excessive force and endangerment of innocent bystanders” by officers. However, the city’s motion called these “remote in time” from the 2023 shooting and that none of the officers involved were part of those cases.
“Even as described by Plaintiff, none of the incidents reflect circumstances even remotely like the incident alleged to be at issue such that they would have put [APD] on notice that different training and/or policies were needed to avoid the incident alleged,” it said.
Federal Judge Alan D. Albright presides over the case. It is currently scheduled to move into a discovery phase in December.
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