Trayon Christian, the young black man who was arrested in 2013 for “shopping while black” at a Barneys New York store has reached a $45,000 settlement with the city, the New York Daily News reports.
According to the Daily News, police stopped Christian on April 27, 2013, after he purchased a $349 reversible black-and-white Salvatore Ferragamo belt from the Upper East Side flagship store.
Christian claimed in a lawsuit filed in October 2013 that the officers arrested him a block away from Barneys, claiming that he used a stolen debit card.
“They said my card wasn’t real, it was fake. They said someone at Barneys called to report it,” Christian, who was 18 at the time of the arrest, told the News in October 2013.
Christian, who was an engineering student at the New York City College of Technology, claims that the officers cuffed him and took him to the 19th Precinct, where he remained for two hours before being released.
City officials claim that Christian was only held for 40 minutes, the Daily News reports. The outlet also notes that in August 2014, “Barneys agreed to pay $525,000 in fines to settle racial profiling claims.” The newspaper did not know how much of that settlement went to Christian, and his lawyers declined to comment.
“Resolving this litigation was in the best interest of the city,” a spokesman for the city’s law department told the Daily News.
Read more at the New York Daily News.