Black Mom Beaten Unconscious by White California Deputies: ‘I Think She’s Out’
A California mother who stopped her car to trade-off driving duty with her father on a family road trip was beaten unconscious and arrested by a pair of Solano County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) deputies, who later lied about it to paramedics and on their official reports, according to a federal lawsuit filed August 18, 2021.
Footage from body cameras worn by the two SCSO deputies, Dalton McCampbell and Lisa McDowell, shows they drew their weapons on Nakia Porter, 33, on the night of August 6, 2020, after she stopped on a rural roadside near Dixon to yield the wheel to her father, 61-year-old Joseph Powell. Porter’s daughters, then aged three and six, were in the backseat with their four-year-old cousin.
McCampbell and McDowell, who are white, did not tell the young Black software engineer and mother that they had stopped her car because its front license plate was one Porter had forgotten to remove after relocating from Maryland. The rear plate, though, was a valid California tag registered to the car in Porter’s name—information the deputies had already verified before leaving their cruiser, the lawsuit alleges. Despite that, they ordered Porter to the ground.
“I’m not resisting,” she replied. “You’re not reading my rights.”
That’s when the deputies took Porter to the ground to handcuff her, manhandling the 125-pound woman until she lost consciousness.
"I think she's out," McCampbell can be heard to say on his body-cam footage.
He and McDowell dragged Porter to their cruiser and called paramedics, telling them that Porter had resisted them when they arrived and then walked herself to the squad car. At one point, they briefly handcuffed and detained her father, too.
"Thankfully, the video evidence contradicted the fabricated facts,” said Porter’s attorney, Yasin Almadani, who believes what occurred “was a racially motivated beating and terrorizing of a Black family.”
Porter was taken to the Solano County lockup and kept overnight on suspicion of resisting arrest, but she was never charged. Her suit seeks a jury trial for the two deputies plus unspecified damages. See: Porter, et al v. Solano County Sheriff’s Office, et al (No. 2:2021at00765, N.D. Calif.)
Source: The Mercury News
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