Ariz. city pays $200K settlement to woman falsely accused in hit-and-run

Scottsdale, Arizona, settles hit-and-run lawsuit with Yessenia Garcia - The Washington Post

Yessenia Garcia and her boyfriend turned to police in May 2020 after a vandal shattered the windshield of her car. Instead of helping, those officers accused Garcia of being involved in a hit-and-run with a pedestrian, arrested her and took her to jail, where she spent the night.

“Yessenia is totally innocent,” her attorney, Benjamin Taylor, told The Washington Post. “… She reached out to Scottsdale police for help as a victim, and she ended up being victimized.”

Lawyers representing the city and police department did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment. But in January 2022, Police Chief Jeff Walther announced the conclusion of an internal affairs investigation into the incident. Investigators determined that seven department employees violated policy in connection with the incident, including three officers who failed to perform their duties by not thoroughly investigating Garcia’s report of vandalism. Two of the officers were punished with unpaid suspensions of 40 hours and 20 hours.

“We made some mistakes plain and simple,” Walther said in a statement through which he offered Garcia his “most sincere apologies.”

On May 24, 2020, Garcia parked her car at a lot in downtown Scottsdale and then walked with her boyfriend to a nightclub to meet friends, her lawsuit says. After partying there for “a significant time,” the group hit up another nightclub nearby.

While they were inside, a vandal smashed Garcia’s windshield, according to the suit and surveillance video.

Later that night, Garcia and her boyfriend left the nightclub to get cigarettes from her car, where, around 11:15 p.m., they discovered that the windshield had been shattered. They immediately approached two Scottsdale police officers who had been patrolling the area on bikes and told them what happened, the suit states.

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, according to the suit and internal affairs report. The couple tried to convince the officers they hadn’t been involved, but 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.”

Garcia and her boyfriend tried to show the officers online records of their transactions from the Hi Fi nightclub, according to the internal affairs report. They implored them to speak to the bouncers at the clubs and pointed out several surveillance cameras that would have recorded their movements throughout the night, the suit states. Garcia’s friends who had been with them at the club showed up and chimed in, trying to convince the officers that the couple had been with them, the report states.

“However, the involved officers … continued to ignore various evidence which established that [Garcia’s] car had not moved since she initially parked it earlier that evening,” according to her lawsuit.

The officers also failed to properly conduct an investigation that would have suggested, if not proved, Garcia’s innocence, the suit alleges. Because it had not been driven for hours, the hood of her car was cold to the touch, the car’s bumper and hood were not dented or bent, Garcia didn’t have any broken glass on her clothing, and there was no blood or human tissue on the car, although the officers didn’t test for that, according to the lawsuit.

About 15 minutes after Garcia and her boyfriend flagged down officers, one of them left to review footage from a surveillance camera that had recorded what happened at Garcia’s parking spot, the internal affairs report says. Even though the video confirmed Garcia’s account, the officer allegedly returned to keep accusing her of driving off in a hit-and-run.

Internal affairs investigators would later determine that the officer concluded that, like Garcia had told him, her car had not moved from 8:45 p.m. onward but nevertheless reported the footage as “inconclusive” because there was “a slight chance” someone had driven off and returned while the camera was panning. Because he had fast-forwarded through much of the video, the officer didn’t see footage of an unidentified suspect stomping on Garcia’s windshield around 10:02 p.m., proving the damage had not been caused by a hit-and-run crash, according to the internal affairs report.

Nevertheless, the officers arrested Garcia, although she was never formally charged with any crime. The police department then released Garcia’s name and mug shot to the media, maligning her “as a drunk driver in a hit and run accident,” the suit states. As a result, Garcia suffered “severe emotional distress” that caused friends, family members and co-workers to stop talking to her.

“Even strangers would give her bad looks and say hurtful things to her for several days after [she] was shown on TV,” the suit says.

Taylor, the lawyer representing Garcia, said she’s happy to put the incident and its aftermath behind her, as best she can.

“This has been a long battle for her,” he said, “a long, emotional battle.”