A federal lawsuit filed in Sacramento on Wednesday alleges a pair of Solano County Sheriff’s deputies arrested and knocked a woman unconscious after she pulled off the road to change drivers during a trip from Oakland to her home outside of Sacramento last August.
Orangeville resident Nakia Porter, 33, and her 61-year-old father, Joe Berry, sued the county, the sheriff's office, deputies Dalton McCampbell, Lisa McDowell and Sgt. Roy Stockton. The father and daughter demanded a jury trial for "violations of their civil and constitutional rights."
The suit alleges that the deputies arrested, assaulted and "then brutally beat (Porter) out of consciousness, without cause" while Berry, Porter's 6-year-old niece, 4- and 3-year-old daughters watched.
"I was doing my best to do everything right, giving no reason to be treated like this," Porter said in a press conference Wednesday.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations uploaded to its YouTube page 10 minutes of edited police bodycam footage recording the deputies drawing guns on Porter, slamming her to the ground and handcuffing her as she repeatedly said she wasn’t "resisting arrest."
Yasin Almadani, the lawyer representing Porter and Berry, told The Associated Press the footage was edited down from 18 minutes after being obtained through a public records request with the state.
Later in the footage, McCampbell told paramedics the deputies only went "hands on" after Porter tried "fighting McDowell."
Almadani called the incident "a racially motivated beating and terrorizing of a Black family." Porter and Berry are Black, while the deputies and their supervisor are white.
Neither Solano County nor the sheriff's office responded to KCBS Radio's requests for comment prior to press time.
Porter and Berry pulled over in Dixon to change drivers on a trip back to Orangeville on Aug. 6, 2020, they said in the footage and in the lawsuit. Porter, a software engineer, then walked from the driver's side to the passenger side of her car, the footage showed.
The deputies then pulled up behind Porter's car with their lights flashing. The suit alleged they then asked Porter to get back in her car, and McCampbell ultimately pointed his gun at Porter and told her, "This is a traffic stop. Get back in the car."
As Porter walked back to the driver's side, the footage then showed McCampbell saying, "You know what, detain her." While the deputies handcuffed Porter, McDowell told her she had two different license plates: One from Maryland in the front, and a California plate in the back.
"However, the deputies had called in the rear license plate to their dispatch and knew that it matched the description of the car and that there was no report of the car being stolen," according to the suit, claiming Porter had forgotten to remove the front license plate after moving to California and that she wasn't given the opportunity to explain what happened to deputies.
The deputies then walked Porter to their patrol car, pushing her against it and then into the ground as they tried to handcuff her. Bodycam footage is shaky, but the suit alleged that the deputies "repeatedly punched, kicked, kneed (and) struck" her head, face, neck and stomach.
"You’re going to get tased," McCampbell said as he mounted Porter, shortly before she said she lost consciousness.
Porter claimed in the suit she lost consciousness for "over five minutes" and was dragged unconscious to the back of the squad car. The deputies were recorded telling paramedics she was knocked out for fewer than 20 seconds. She said the deputies denied her request that paramedics transport her to the hospital, instead taking Porter to an emergency room for medical examination themselves.
Porter was booked on charges of obstruction and resisting executive officers last August, and the suit claimed McCampbell and McDowell lied on arrest reports about Porter fighting them and how long she was unconscious. Stockton, their supervisor, was named in the lawsuit for signing off on the deputies' reports.
The Solano County District Attorney's Office ultimately opted not to file charges against Porter last September.
You can read the entirety of Wednesday's federal court filing below.