A federal jury has awarded a woman and her teenage daughters more than $8 million after an incident in 2019 where they were taken from their car in a Starbucks parking lot, handcuffed and held in a patrol car.
Aasylei Loggervale and her two daughters, Aaottae Loggervale, then 17, and Aasyeli Hardege-Loggervale, then 19, had been driving all night, heading out from their Las Vegas home to California’s Berkeley City College in time for Loggervale’s older daughter to take a statistics exam.
According to Loggervale, the three pulled into a Castro Valley, Calif., Starbucks parking lot to get some coffee and use the restroom before heading to the college.
As the three parked and began to get ready to go into the store, an Alameda County Sheriff’s Officer, Steven Holland, knocked on the driver’s side window and told Loggervale that he was investigating car break-ins in the area. He asked to see Loggervale’s identification, according to The Washington Post, but Loggervale refused. She said she hadn’t done anything wrong and asked why she was being questioned, she said.
Holland later wrote in his report that he detained the three after receiving reports of car break-ins involving Black males in a silver vehicle like the one Loggervale was driving,
However, the report was incorrect, according to one of Loggervale’s attorneys, Craig Peters. A report of a car break-in from the previous day described a Black male and a Latino male driving a two-door, dark gray hatchback as the suspects who broke into a victim’s silver SUV.
According to Holland’s body camera footage, Loggervale again refused to show her identification, and Holland said she had no choice.
Loggervale then told her daughter to start recording Holland on her phone.
“I got to have protection,” Loggervale said when Holland questioned why she felt she needed to record him. “Because I don’t know where this is about to go.”
When one of her daughters got out of the car to go into the store to use the restroom, Holland told her to get back in the car, then said, “Okay, everyone in this car is detained. You can go back in the car and wait, or you can go in handcuffs and go in my car.”
Holland then opened Loggervale’s door and grabbed her arm while ordering her out of the car. Loggervale got out of the car and instructed her daughters to stay calm. Officers handcuffed all three family members and placed them in patrol vehicles, then searched Loggervale’s car before eventually releasing the family, KTVU reported.
Loggervale’s attorney said the family was detained because they are Black.
“I think that everybody recognizes we all have implicit bias,” Peters said in an interview on Monday. “I have it. You have it. We’ve all got it. These officers are no different. And so, subconsciously, there was something going on that made them unreasonably suspicious of this family. I think that if this same scenario happened and these were white women, it would have played out very differently.”
The family sued Holland, a second officer at the scene and Alameda County for alleged false arrest, invasion of privacy, negligence and violations of the 1st, 4th and 14th Amendments.
According to Peters, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office did not discipline the officers involved, the Post reported. Both Holland and the other deputy named in the lawsuit, Monica Pope, were later promoted to captains, Peters said.
