Then in 2019, U.S. District Judge Samuel Mays Jr. ruled to dismiss the city from the case, but he let the suit against the officer as an individual continue.
The Stewart family dropped its suit against the police officer and asked an appeals court to reverse the judge's ruling and reinstate the city as a defendant.
In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit affirmed the judge's decision to dismiss the city government from the case.
That led to Friday's court filing restarting the lawsuit, this time against the officer alone.
"As a direct and proximate result of the actions or omissions of the defendant ... Stewart was killed, and his constitutional rights under the United States Constitution and Tennessee Constitution were violated," the new lawsuit says.
The new suit seeks $17.2 million in damages. It's the same amount family members demanded in the prior lawsuit.
Darrius Stewart's father, Williams, is not named as a plaintiff in the current lawsuit.
Shooting took place after a traffic stop
After a traffic stop and a struggle by Winchester Road in Hickory Hill, Schilling shot and killed Stewart. Stewart had outstanding warrants, including one that alleged that as a young teenager, he had sexually abused children in Iowa City, Iowa. (Stewart's mother has challenged that accusation.)
The police department later accused the officer of violating handcuff and radio procedures in relation to Stewart's arrest. Internal investigators concluded Stewart may have overheard radio traffic related to his outstanding warrants, prompting an unpredictable reaction, and that Schilling used incorrect handcuffing procedures that allowed Stewart to escape before the two started struggling.
Many details about the shooting are disputed — including whether Stewart was violent and aggressive toward the officer — though both sides agree that a struggle took place, the judge wrote in a summary of the shooting.
The city pension board in 2016 granted Schilling a line-of-duty disability pension, which his representatives said was related to post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the shooting. He was 27 at the time and was scheduled to receive about $2,300 per month, plus a 70% subsidy of his monthly health care premiums, for the rest of his life.
Officer was cleared of wrongdoing
Though Schilling might still face civil liability, authorities have cleared him of criminal wrongdoing.
Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich said in 2015 she recommended to a grand jury that Schilling be indicted on charges of voluntary manslaughter as well as using a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony. However, the grand jury didn't indict Schilling.
Federal authorities also reviewed the case and in 2016 announced "insufficient evidence" to bring charges against Schilling.
Stewart shooting and resulting protests helped changed policies
The Stewart shooting prompted protests in Memphis and led to greater scrutiny of the often-secretive process for investigating officer-involved shootings.
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation files are generally closed, but a judge's order in 2015 led to the release of the investigative file into Stewart's shooting.
The shooting also helped end the practice of local authorities investigating their own officers' actions in fatal officer-involved shootings. In 2015, local authorities signed a memorandum of agreement bringing in the TBI to investigate all deaths caused by police in the line of duty and any suspicious deaths in custody.
The cooperation with TBI has limits — when a man named Martavious Banks was shot by Memphis police in 2018, for instance, the TBI wasn't immediately brought in because the victim didn't die. (The TBI was later brought in to review the case, which has since spawned a separate lawsuit.)
Since the Stewart shooting, the Shelby County District Attorney's Office has begun posting TBI officer-involved shooting investigative files on a special website, though often with heavy redactions.
Additionally, in 2017, the Tennessee legislature passed a law that says that at the completion of a TBI investigation into an officer-involved shooting death and conclusion of prosecutorial review, the investigative file becomes a public record.
Reporter Daniel Connolly contributed to this article.