San Leandro with Two Police Brutality Settlements

Credit to the Bay Area News Group and The San Francisco Chronicle.

"San Leandro to pay $3.9 million settlement amid claims officers beat, tased mentally disabled man in 2019. The settlement marks at least the sixth time either officer has been sued over their actions as police officers in the East Bay

San Leandro is expected to pay $3.9 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit claiming the city’s police officers brutally beat a mentally disabled man in 2019, causing his brain to bleed so badly that he suffered repeated strokes.

The city’s payout comes nearly five years after Sorrell Shiflett, 37, was tased and bludgeoned by two San Leandro police officers while walking with his cousin through a neighborhood in search of a friend’s house, according to the federal lawsuit.

The case marks at least the sixth time that either officer — Ismael Navarro or Anthony Pantoja — has been named in a lawsuit claiming they acted violently while working for multiple police departments across the East Bay, the lawsuit claimed. Settlements were reached in four prior cases, while one remains open.

The latest payout highlights another clear example of “over-aggressive policing and a failure to accommodate a person’s disability,” said civil rights attorney Adante Pointer, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Shiflett. “This is the carnage that results from police refusing — or failing to accommodate — a person’s disability, and being too quick to resort to force when they should be relying on the skills they’ve been trained and entrusted to use.”

It was unclear Monday afternoon whether either officer still worked for the San Leandro Police Department. Neither the San Leandro city manager’s office, nor the police department responded to a request for comment by this news organization.

The beating involving Shiflett happened shortly before dawn on Oct. 6, 2019, after someone called San Leandro police to report “suspicious” men walking on Maria Drive, according to the lawsuit.

Navarro and Pantoja appeared to quickly zero in on Shiflett — who was dressed as his favorite character from the anime show Naruto — as well as his cousin.

The cousin warned officers that Shiflett suffered from a traumatic brain injury that left him with a child-like demeanor, Pointer said. The prior brain injury, which Shiflett suffered while being robbed at gunpoint in 2008, left him with Broca’s aphasia. The condition makes it difficult to communicate and quickly comprehend others’ words and actions.

Shiflett himself talked to the officers and tried to answer their questions, while speaking with an affect “that makes it readily apparent he suffers from a disability,” the lawsuit said.

Yet the encounter took a turn when Shiflett tried running home, in an apparent bid to get his father to explain his condition to the officers, the lawsuit said. The officers gave chase, leading Pantoja to pull out his baton and beat Shiflett while Navarro tased him, the lawsuit alleged. At one point, the officers pinned Shiflett to the cement and pushed his head into the ground, all before Pantoja resumed pummeling him with the baton, according to the complaint.

Afterward, a different officer dropped Shiflett off at a hospital — a move that appeared to be an attempt by Navarro and Pantoja to “conceal their involvement” in the beating, the lawsuit claimed.

Pantoja did not turn on his camera until after the beating had ended, and Navarro’s camera remained off the entire time — all in violation of department policy, the lawsuit alleged. The department “also failed to conduct a subsequent internal affairs investigation,” Pointer’s firm alleged in a press release announcing the settlement.

On Monday, Pointer said Shiflett continues to suffer from the encounter, with the beating having made his traumatic brain injury even worse.

“This incident is a recurring nightmare for him, because he still struggles to understand why the police did this to him,” Pointer said.

The settlement marks the latest in a growing list of payouts involving Navarro and Pantoja, the lawsuit alleged.

Bay Area Rapid Transit reached a settlement with a man who was tasered by Navarro in 2014, while the officer worked for the transit agency’s police department.

Both he and Pantoja also were named in another lawsuit that claimed Navarro wrongfully tased a man in 2018 while Pantola beat him with a baton, Shiflett’s lawsuit said. The incident happened while both worked for the San Leandro Police Department.

San Leandro also reached settlements in two other 2018 cases regarding Pantoja, Shiflett’s lawsuit said. In addition, the officer is named in an ongoing lawsuit over the death of Vasquinho Bettencourt, who was fatally shot by Pantoja in August 2020.

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"San Leandro quietly settles alleged police brutality case for nearly $1 million:

The city of San Leandro has quietly reached a settlement with an unarmed man who was beaten by police officers while walking around his neighborhood in 2021, the Chronicle has learned.

San Leandro settled the federal civil rights lawsuit with a $950,000 payment in January, said David M. Helbraun, a private attorney who represented the man, Stipe Cikes. The case had been scheduled to go to trial the following month.

Cikes, a dual national who grew up between the Bay Area and Croatia, has returned to Croatia and declined through his attorney to comment for this story. 

According to the lawsuit, the incident began just after midnight on Feb. 17, 2021. Cikes, who was 21 at the time, was walking in the neighborhood where he lived when he was confronted by a car that pulled up and shined its lights on him.

A man in the car asked Cikes if he was OK. Cikes said he was and jogged away, unclear of who the person in the car was. The car followed him. The car then stopped and two men got out and chased Cikes, the lawsuit said, tackling him to the ground.

The men who had been following him were officers, and they beat and handcuffed him, the lawsuit alleged. 

Body camera footage viewed by the Chronicle captured police striking Cikes in the head multiple times as they held him down on the ground. The footage has not been released publicly. 

“Don’t grab my neck,” one of the officers says, to which Cikes responds, “Yes.” 

The main officer who is on top of him seems to tell him to “Put your hands behind your back.” It’s not clear if Cikes understands. The officer strikes him hard in the face, according to the video. The officer continues barking the command at him, which gets less intelligible each time he says it, and strikes him repeatedly in the head. 

“Yes, tell me, please,” Cikes says. “I am.” 

“Please!” he says at one point. “What’s going on?!”

As one officer puts handcuffs on his left hand, Cikes holds his right arm up to try to protect himself from the blows. 

Overall, the officer strikes him in the head at least a dozen times.

The approximately minute long snippet, shared with the Chronicle by Helbraun, captures the most violent part of the confrontation, but not anything before it. Helbraun declined to give the Chronicle the video file to publish, citing his client’s wishes. 

The city of San Leandro also declined to release the full footage as part of a public records request from the Chronicle, saying that the video file was exempt from disclosure because “police investigative files and medical information are ‘by (their) nature confidential and widely treated as such.’ ”

The incident occurred in the residential neighborhood around Lasuen Drive and Monterey Boulevard in the southern end of the city, east of Interstate 880, according to Helbraun and police records.

Police officers had arrived in the area after a concerned resident called 911 upon seeing someone walking around after midnight, according to a recording of the call.

But the two men had not identified themselves before tackling and “commencing to subdue” Cikes, and Cikes did not know they were officers, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit identified the two officers as Neil Goodman and Caleb Schwitters.

A third officer who arrived at the scene later was identified in the complaint as Ismael Navarro. Cikes was handcuffed and placed in a full body restraint, called a WRAP restraint, and taken to the hospital because he was injured, the lawsuit said. After that, he was taken to Santa Rita Jail, from which he was released several hours later, Helbraun said.

An arrest report prepared by the police department showed that officers planned to charge Cikes with a felony for resisting an executive officer and a misdemeanor for disturbing the peace, but he was never charged, Helbraun said.

San Leandro paid $500,000 and its insurance carrier paid the remaining amount, said Paul Sanftner, a spokesperson for the city. There was no admission of liability or wrongdoing by the police department, Sanftner said.

The union representing San Leandro police officers did not respond to requests for comment. Sanftner, the city spokesperson, did not answer questions about the specific allegations made in the lawsuit.

Two days after his release from Santa Rita, Cikes visited an urgent care clinic, where he was diagnosed with “post-concussion syndrome.” 

The lawsuit said that Cikes had a traumatic brain injury from blows to his head during the altercation, suffering a hematoma — internal bleeding and swelling at various portions of his head and skull. His injuries also included bruising on his torso and chest. The injuries impaired his cognitive ability, motor skills and emotional well-being, the suit alleged. 

Cikes is a skilled mason and tile setter, having trained at a sculpting academy in Croatia, Helbraun said. He had hopes of starting an upscale kitchen and bathroom renovation business, but the injuries he suffered left him with a shaking hand, challenging his ability to work effectively, Helbraun said.

Cikes filed a formal complaint with the police department on June 3, 2021, the lawsuit said. He moved back to Croatia after the incident, Helbraun said, and chose not to comment to the Chronicle on the case or the settlement.

Helbraun said the police department neglected to further review the incident, as it is required to do when someone files a citizen’s complaint. 

The department later told Helbraun and Cikes that it had never received the complaint, even though it was delivered with a proof of receipt from the post office, according to the lawsuit. A sergeant had called Cikes after he filed it, using the phone number he put on the complaint form, Helbraun said.

“In addition to what we thought was a strong case for excessive force, in my view something hinky was going on with how they treat citizen complaints,” Helbraun said in an interview. “And whether they do independent investigations as their policy requires — or not.”

The police force in San Leandro has faced scrutiny in other cases in recent years. 

A San Leandro officer, Jason Fletcher, who is no longer on the force, is facing voluntary manslaughter charges for fatally shooting a man, Steven Taylor, who wielded a baseball bat inside a Walmart in 2020. Fletcher, the first police officer charged in a civilian’s death in Alameda County in more than a decade, has pleaded not guilty. 

Months later, amid a national uproar over the death of George Floyd, the City Council voted to pull $1.7 million from the police department’s budget."

Take note and take care.