Andrew Evans v. Mark Gordon

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
• Decided: October 20, 2025
• Docket: 24-2094
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 25a0482n.06

Nos. 24-2066/2094

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

ANDREW EVANS and RYAN GEHEB, ) FILED ) Oct 20, 2025 Plaintiffs-Appellees/Cross-Appellants, ) KELLY L. STEPHENS, Clerk ) v. ) ) ON APPEAL FROM THE ) UNITED STATES DISTRICT MARK GORDON, BRADLEY BELDO, ) COURT FOR THE EASTERN CHRISTOPHER HARMON, EMILY MCGRATH, ) TERRY ROSS, NICOLE THOMPSON, and JOHN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN ) AND JANE DOE OFFICERS, ) Defendants-Appellants, ) OPINION ) MICHAEL WADSWORTH and JESSIE HURSE, ) ) Defendants-Appellants/Cross-Appellees. )

Before: COLE, KETHLEDGE, and NALBANDIAN, Circuit Judges.

KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge. Three college students were in a car while one of them

pointed a Nerf gun out the window and shouted “Give me all your money!” at various students

walking by. All three students in the car were arrested for armed robbery that night and suspended

from school the next day.

The driver and the idle passenger later brought this suit against two university

administrators and several members of the campus police department. The district court granted

the defendants’ motion to dismiss two claims, but denied their motion for qualified immunity at

the pleadings stage. We affirm that denial and dismiss the plaintiffs’ cross-appeal. Nos. 24-2066/2094, Evans, et al. v. Gordon, et al.

I.

We accept as true the facts alleged in the plaintiffs’ complaint. Franz v. Oxford Cmty. Sch.

Dist., 132 F.4th 447, 449 (6th Cir. 2025).

One evening in March 2022, three members of the Oakland University men’s varsity swim

team—Ryan Geheb, Andrew Evans, and Valance Washington—decided to drive to the cafeteria

together. Geheb drove, Evans sat in the back, and Washington sat in front with his window down.

Washington had brought along Evans’s yellow-orange Nerf gun—a small pistol-shaped children’s

toy. At one point, Washington, without advance notice to the others, pointed the Nerf gun out his

window and yelled “Give me all your money!” to a group of students on the sidewalk. Am. Compl.

¶ 19. Geheb continued to drive, never stopping or slowing down, and Washington repeated his

prank twice more before the car reached the cafeteria. When the three drove back from dinner,

Washington pulled his prank a few more times.

A student who had been at the other end of Washington’s Nerf gun called the Oakland

University Police Department to tell them as much. The Department asked the student and her

friend to come to the station and provide written statements. Based on those statements—which

said both that the students had been frightened and that they thought the gun was fake—the

Department sent an emergency alert to the university community. Another student then called the

Department to report that she, too, had encountered a man with a Nerf gun—but she had thought

his demand for money “was kind of a joke.” Am. Compl. ¶ 32.

The Department reviewed security footage and determined that the car in question

belonged to Geheb. That evening, Officer Christopher Harmon and Sergeant Bradley Beldo

visited the dorm that he and Washington shared. Washington answered the door and explained

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that he had never meant to scare anyone. Sergeant Beldo asked him to come to the station later

and to bring his friends.

When the young men arrived, Officer Harmon took them one-by-one to the interview

room; afterward, he arrested each of them for armed robbery. The three spent the night in the

Oakland County Jail. They were released the next morning, but as they left Chief of Police Mark

Gordon handed each of them a citation for disturbing the peace.

The same day, Dean of Student Affairs and Diversity Michael Wadsworth sent letters to

the three students immediately suspending them and charging each with six Code of Conduct

violations. The letters directed the students to contact the Dean of Students Office to discuss the

charges and their hearing options. The following Monday—four days after Wadsworth sent the

letters—Wadsworth met with the students and reinstated their enrollment. Yet the Code of

Conduct charges remained. Washington ultimately agreed to a plea deal with Wadsworth, but

Evans and Geheb chose to make their case before the Code of Conduct committee.

The committee found both students responsible for “Disruptive Behavior” and

“Intimidation.” Am. Compl. ¶ 119. It placed them on disciplinary probation, ordered them to

write reflection papers, and required them to serve as graduation-ceremony ushers. Evans and

Geheb timely noticed an appeal of the committee’s decision but did not pursue it. A few weeks

later, Oakland County prosecutors dismissed the students’ disturbing-the-peace charges with

prejudice.

About two years later, Evans and Geheb brought this suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. They

asserted three claims against the university administrators: that Wadsworth had violated their

procedural-due-process rights by suspending them without a prior hearing; that Wadsworth and

Associate Dean Jessie Hurse had violated their procedural-due-process rights by rigging their

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committee hearing; and that both administrators had violated their equal-protection rights by

aggressively disciplining them to match Washington’s punishment and theirs. Evans and Geheb

also sued several university police officers for false arrest and malicious prosecution.

The defendants filed a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss, along with a slew of exhibits. They

argued that qualified immunity barred the false-arrest, malicious-prosecution, and suspension-

based due-process claims, and that the rigged-hearing and equal-protection counts failed to state a

claim. The district court dismissed the latter two. But it determined that the plaintiffs had

adequately alleged a violation of clearly established law for the suspension-based due-process

claim, and that a determination of the police-defendants’ entitlement to qualified immunity was

premature at the pleadings stage. The defendants timely noticed this interlocutory appeal, and

Evans and Geheb cross-appealed the dismissal of their rigged-hearing claim.

II.

We have jurisdiction over this interlocutory appeal because the defendants argue they are

entitled to qualified immunity. Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530 (1985). Our jurisdiction

here extends only to questions of law, which we review de novo. Bey v. Falk, 946 F.3d 304, 311–

12 (6th Cir. 2019).

The parties seem unsure whether the district court provisionally determined that the police

officers lack qualified immunity or instead chose to defer that decision until summary judgment.

Either way, we treat a refusal to grant qualified immunity the same as we do a denial. Sterling

Hotels, LLC v. McKay, 71 F.4th 463, 466 (6th Cir. 2023).

The officers argue they are immune from the plaintiffs’ false-arrest and malicious-

prosecution claims. To overcome qualified immunity, Evans and Geheb must plausibly allege that

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the officers’ conduct violated their clearly established constitutional rights. See Martinez v. Wayne

County, 142 F.4th 828, 835 (6th Cir. 2025).

For their false-arrest claim, the plaintiffs must plausibly allege that the officers lacked

probable cause to arrest them for any crime—not just the crime the police charged them with. See

Hartman v. Thompson, 931 F.3d 471, 482–83 (6th Cir. 2019). Here, the officers argue they had

probable cause to arrest Evans and Geheb for aiding and abetting Washington in the violation of

various disturbing-the-peace and disorderly-conduct ordinances. The officers say, for example,

that Washington violated both Oakland University Ordinance 7.03, by using a toy gun on campus

to intimidate other students, and Rochester Ordinance 32-246, by engaging in conduct that raised

concerns for student safety. The officers also say they had probable cause to believe the plaintiffs

joined in these putative offenses as aiders and abettors—because the Nerf gun belonged to Evans,

and Geheb drove the car, and both stayed in the car throughout the pranks.

Under Michigan law, to arrest the plaintiffs as aiders and abettors, the officers needed

probable cause to believe that Evans and Geheb knowingly assisted Washington in violating the

cited ordinances. See Davis v. Lafler, 658 F.3d 525, 531 (6th Cir. 2011). But the plaintiffs allege

that they “were merely present in the car,” and that Washington’s pranks were both unilateral and

spontaneous. Am. Compl. ¶¶ 26, 46, 77, 113. Hence the plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that they

were arrested without probable cause. And the same is true for their malicious-prosecution claim,

which likewise requires an absence of probable cause for the crime charged. Howell v.

McCormick, 148 F.4th 834, 852–53 (6th Cir. 2025).

The officers counter that the exhibits to their motion—an excerpt from Geheb’s police

interrogation, for example, and a transcript of a 911 call—show that they had probable cause to

arrest Evans and Geheb. But none of these exhibits correct some unfair omission from the

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complaint itself; rather, they amount to a curated sample of evidence that a party might cite for

purposes of Rule 56. See Blackwell v. Nocerini, 123 F.4th 479, 486 (6th Cir. 2024). The district

court was well within its discretion to refuse to consider these exhibits in what the officers

themselves styled as a motion on the pleadings. See Caraway v. CoreCivic of Tenn., LLC, 98 F.4th

679, 688 (6th Cir. 2024).

That leaves the question whether the case law would have made clear to each of these

officers that their respective actions toward these plaintiffs—seizing them for 12 hours or so, and

charging each of them with a crime—violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. On that point

the officers say the plaintiffs have not cited any cases involving police actions akin to those here.

But the district court again was easily within its discretion to reject that argument at the pleadings

stage. Ultimately, the plaintiffs must cite case law that would have made clear to each officer that

his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted. District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S.

48, 63 (2018). But at the pleadings stage, we lack knowledge of what that situation was. Instead

we have only the complaint’s allegations and the untold plausible inferences that one might draw

from them. Until those allegations and inferences become more concrete, it is enough for the

plaintiffs’ claim to proceed that the “right to freedom from arrest without probable cause” is one

of the “quintessential examples of ‘clearly established’ constitutional rights.” Jones v. City of

Elyria, 947 F.3d 905, 915 (6th Cir. 2020).

The same reasoning supports affirmance of the district court’s denial of qualified immunity

to Dean Wadsworth. We do not know all the particulars of the facts relevant to the claim against

him any more than we do the facts as to the officers. Indeed, the defendants’ arguments here

illustrate why motions asserting qualified immunity should usually be brought after discovery, not

before. Motions like the one here—when the relevant facts comprise the ones alleged in the

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complaint plus a nebula of favorable inferences indulged at the pleadings stage—usually waste the

time of the parties and courts alike.

Finally, we lack jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ cross-appeal, which focuses on their claim

that Wadsworth and Hurse rigged their disciplinary hearing. That claim presents questions distinct

from those raised as to qualified immunity. See Salter v. City of Detroit, 133 F.4th 527, 534 (6th

Cir. 2025).

We affirm the district court’s December 3, 2024 order and dismiss the plaintiffs’ cross-

appeal.

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