When Yessenia Garcia and her boyfriend told police that a vandal shattered the window of their car, police in turn accused her of being involved in a hit-and-run, arrested her, and forced her to spend a night in jail.
Now, three years later, she settled a federal lawsuit for $200,000 last week with the city of Scottsdale, Arizona with claims of false arrest, negligence and denial of due process, The Washington Post reported.
“Yessenia is totally innocent,” her attorney, Benjamin Taylor, told The Post. “… She reached out to Scottsdale police for help as a victim, and she ended up being victimized.”
An internal affairs investigation into the incident that was completed in 2022 found that that seven department employees violated policy, including three officers who failed to thoroughly investigate Garcia’s report of vandalism.
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While Garcia was enjoying a night out on the town in Scottsdale on May 24, 2020, a vandal smashed her windshield. When the pair returned to her car and found the smashed windshield, they alerted two Scottsdale police officers.
Instead of investigating the vandalism, the officers accused her and her boyfriend of being suspects in a hit-and-run crash that happened about a half-hour earlier.
When the couple protested, the officers allegedly “refused to listen to them and ignored a plethora of … evidence readily available to them at the scene which easily established that [Garcia] and her boyfriend were telling the truth.”
The suit alleges the officers also failed to properly conduct an investigation that would have suggested, if not proved, the couple was telling the truth. One officer continued to accuse the couple even after reviewing security footage that recorded what happened to Garcia's car.
The officers arrested Garcia but never formally charged her with a crime. Police then released Garcia’s name and mug shot to the media, saying she was "a drunk driver in a hit and run accident,” the suit states.
Read the full report over at The Washington Post.
