SCRANTON, Pa. — The mother of a slain confidential informant settled a federal civil rights lawsuit with Lackawanna County law enforcement for $1.85 million, according to the county's general counsel.
Payment to the estate of Nina Gatto will be borne primarily by the Lackawanna County district attorney's office, whose detectives recruited and used Gatto as a confidential informant to target a drug dealer who ultimately killed her. Dunmore, which also employed a detective who worked on the drug investigation that led to her death, will also bear some of the cost of the settlement.
In both cases, payment is covered by insurance carriers, said Don Frederickson, Lackawanna County's general counsel and acting solicitor. The settlement also cleared the county itself of liability, he said.
Frederickson said he was happy the case is settled without the added expense and anguish of a trial.
District Attorney Mark Powell said Gatto became an informant two days after he took office as the top prosecutor.
"In response to her murder, we revised and instituted new policies regarding confidential informants, and I personally put her killer behind bars for life," he said in a message.
That killer, police said, was Cornelius Mapson — a member of the violent street gang, the Bloods.
Mapson and others injected Gatto with a lethal dose of fentanyl in her north Scranton home on April 20, 2018, and then he suffocated her while she overdosed.
He discovered Gatto worked with the police as a confidential informant and helped aid their investigation into Mapson's drug dealing months earlier.
It was a danger in which Gatto should not have been placed, attorneys retained by her mother said.
Gatto, 24, lived with dissociative identity disorder. A court appointed her mother, Katie Gatto, her guardian in 2015 because a judge found Nina Gatto could not safely and consistently manage her life. The 24-year-old also used drugs to self-medicate.
“Nina Gatto lacked the capacity to understand the nature of the risks being taken nor properly protect herself once placed at risk,” her attorneys said in a lawsuit that stemmed from her death.
Detectives arrested Gatto in January 2018 for selling 10 bags of heroin, court filings say. Soon, she found herself working as an informant helping bring charges against Mapson, a known gang member.
Mapson, 38, posted bail for the drug charges soon after his arrest. Gatto worried that her involvement would be apparent, but the detectives she worked with tried to assuage her.
Despite assurances, anxiety clawed at her mind. The attorneys later hired by Gatto's mother said the detectives did not do enough to protect her.
“Someone else showed up at my house,” Nina Gatto texted her mother. “I’m scared I feel paranoid like someone is after me. Like someone is trying to get revenge. They just keep sending people.”
“Someone keeps knocking at my door,” she continued. “They’ve been knocking all day…I hate being scared.”
Weeks later, she was dead.
Mapson and two others face charges for Gatto’s killing. Mapson’s co-defendants — Melinda Palermo and Kevin Weeks — pleaded guilty in 2020 and testified against Mapson at trial in June that year.
Lackawanna County Judge James Gibbons sentenced Mapson to life imprisonment.
Soon after his sentencing, Katie Gatto filed a federal lawsuit seeking damages for her daughter's death. Attorneys Sal Cognetti, Vincent Cimini, and Robert Levant brought the suit.
The lawsuit called the actions by law enforcement “an appalling abrogation of duties.”
"Had the defendants asked the most basic questions about Nina Gatto’s mental health history, they would have immediately known that any consent offered was legally invalid,” the attorneys wrote. “To the extent that the defendants asked any questions about Nina Gatto’s mental health history, they ignored the information provided by Nina Gatto establishing her as legally incapacitated.”
The attorneys who represented Katie Gatto declined to comment.
Mapson remains locked up at the state prison in Waymart.