In July 2018, a police encounter ended poorly when an officer’s canine repeatedly bit a woman whose boyfriend had called the police because she was having a mental health crisis. Now a judge has ruled that the dog bite was not “unreasonable.”
Officers responded to a call from Olivia Sligh’s boyfriend, who had reported that she cut herself and was suicidal after a change in her medication. Sligh, 29, shared with NBC News that she has a borderline personality disorder, and the medication “made me more depressed, more upset. I was lashing out.”
While her partner contacted the authorities in an effort to help, the incident quickly went sideways as the responding officer’s body camera footage shows the dog, Thor, biting Sligh repeatedly for just over a minute while ignoring release commands from the officer.
The encounter left Sligh with more than a dozen scars and a herniated disk, resulting in her filing an excessive force lawsuit in April 2020.
However, Judge Charles Eskridge, who serves in the U.S. District Court in Houston, dismissed the lawsuit, saying that excessive force was warranted with Sligh resisting the two responding officers, NBC News reported.
“What they should have done is treated me like a mentally ill person, and not like I just shot somebody,” Sligh told NBC News. “That’s how I feel I got treated.”
The court documents obtained by the news organization say that Sligh “assaulted” Montgomery County Sheriff’s Deputy Alexis Montes while he was trying to handcuff her. It was then that Conroe Police Department K-9 officer Tyson Sutton’s dog Thor began biting Sligh.
Eskridge wrote that the officer’s “use of the canine under these circumstances can’t be said to be unreasonable. Neither can it be said that his subsequent inability to instantly detach the canine somehow made its use unreasonable.”
He continued saying that while the dog was biting Sligh for over a minute, she continued to struggle, and the officer was giving commands to detach.
However, Sligh tells a different story, denying that she assaulted Montes. Instead, she told NBC News she “was pulling my arms and not letting him grab me.”
An attorney representing officer Sutton, Steven Selbe, praised the decision by Eskridge, saying he “carefully considered the motions” while looking into the evidence that was provided. He called his decision “thoughtful and well-reasoned.”
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