Alexander v. Round Lake Park

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS

EASTERN DIVISION

Quendalyne Alexander )

)

Plaintiff, )

)

)

v. ) Case No. 16 C 2410

)

)

Villages of Round Lake Park and )

Round Lake, Municipal Corporations, )

Officer Matthew Lyons, Commander )

Anthony Colon, and Officer Brandon )

Gullifor,

Defendants.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

In the early morning hours of March 7, 2015, officers Matthew

Lyons and Anthony Colon of the Village of Round Lake Park police

department responded to a 911 call reporting that a woman had

jumped from a window and was lying in the snow. The officers

arrived at the scene and found the woman, later identified as

Natasha Alexander, unconscious and bleeding. Plaintiff—Natasha’s

cousin—was in a car parked in the driveway of plaintiff’s sister’s

house, a few doors down from where Natasha lay. Officer Colon

spoke briefly with plaintiff, then asked her to get into Officer

Lyons’s squad car to get out of the cold. Plaintiff got into the

car, and Officer Lyons pulled off, leaving Officer Colon at the

scene.

As Officer Lyons transported plaintiff to the police station,

an argument erupted in the squad car, prompting Officer Lyons to

pull over into the parking lot of a nearby restaurant and call for

backup. Officer Colon and Officer Brandon Gullifor of the Village

of Round Lake Police Department arrived at the scene, and together

the officers removed plaintiff from the car and handcuffed her.

Later, she pled guilty to domestic battery of Natasha and battery

of Officer Lyons. Plaintiff brings this action under 42 U.S.C.

§ 1983, claiming that the officers used excessive force during her

arrest.

Before me are defendants’ motions for summary judgment, which

argue that on the undisputed record, the force they used was

reasonable under the circumstances; and that even if the force the

officers used was excessive, they are entitled to qualified

immunity. For the reasons that follow, I conclude that even when

all factual disputes are resolved in plaintiff’s favor, the record

would not allow a reasonable jury to find that defendants violated

plaintiff’s constitutional rights, and I grant summary judgment on

that basis.

I.

Although the parties present starkly different accounts of

the events culminating in the challenged use of force, I assume

the facts are as plaintiff recounts them wherever the record

reasonably allows. On the night in question, plaintiff was at her

sister’s house for a birthday celebration when her cousin Natasha

arrived in a “rageful” state. Pl.’s Dep., DN 55-1 at 44, 51.

Plaintiff tried to calm Natasha down, but matters escalated, and

plaintiff pushed Natasha onto a couch. Natasha “charged at”

plaintiff, “busting” plaintiff’s nose. Id. at 55, 66. Plaintiff

went to the bathroom to tend to her nose, then left the house and

sat in a car in the driveway. Id. at 57, 65-66. As she sat in the

car, Officer Colon approached and asked, “why was [Natasha] hiding

in the bushes?” Id. at 71. Plaintiff saw Natasha talking to police

outside the house. Id. at 70. Natasha was sitting on the curb and

shaking her head, and she “didn’t look like herself” but was not

bleeding and did not look injured. Id. at 72, 74. Officer Colon

asked plaintiff to step inside his car “[b]ecause it [was] cold

outside, and [he] want[ed] to talk to [her].” Id. at 73, 75.

Plaintiff agreed to get in the back of the squad car. Id. at 74,

82. Officer Lyons immediately pulled off. Id. at 76.

Plaintiff testified that she told Officer Lyons that she

wanted to call her sister to tell her where she was being taken.

Officer Lyons then “flipped out” and started screaming that she

could not use her “f***ing cell phone in [his] car.” Officer Lyons

pulled over, “smashed the door open,” and told plaintiff to “step

the f*ck out” of his car. Plaintiff remained “completely calm” but

refused to get out. Id. at 87-88. Officer Lyons was trying to

“snatch” plaintiff out of the car when Officers Colon and Gullifor

arrived. Id. at 89. The officers continued to tell plaintiff to

get out of the car. Plaintiff refused to get out, but she remained

calm and did not yell, swear, or kick at the officers. Id. 89-90,

97.

Plaintiff testified that the officers then forced her out of

the car and “slammed” her to the ground, injuring her face, elbow,

and knee. Id. at 94, 141-143. As plaintiff lay on the ground, the

officers put their knees on her back and pulled at her arms. Id.

at 96-98. She told the officers they were hurting her, but they

did not stop, so she “just played dead.” Id. at 96. Sometime

later, plaintiff was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but

she refused medical care after seeing Officer Lyons laughing and

joking with hospital staff. Id. at 105. She told a doctor, “[j]ust

send me home. Send me home or take me to jail.” Id. at 109, 111.

A portion of plaintiff’s arrest was captured by the “dash

cam” device in Officer Gullifor’s squad car. The video recording

begins as officer Gullifor pulls up behind Officer Lyons’s parked

squad car in the parking lot of The Pizza Place restaurant, where

Officer Lyons had pulled over. See Exh. D to Round Lake Park

Def.’s L.R. 56.1 Stmt.; Pl.’s Dep. at 27. Officer Gulliver then

approaches Officer Lyons’s vehicle on foot, where one officer can

be seen standing off to the side of the vehicle, while another

officer not visible on screen can be heard arguing with plaintiff.

Plaintiff can be seen and heard screaming obscenities at the

unseen officer from within the vehicle. The officer tells her,

“I’m about two seconds away from cuffing you.” Plaintiff responds,

“cuff me, cuff me motherf***er,” and continues to scream

obscenities. The standing officer then opens the rear passenger’s

side door, and plaintiff yells “get your motherf***ing hands off

me.” An officer tells her, “you gotta get cuffed,” and she screams

“don’t f***ing touch me” then begins kicking the officer at the

rear passenger door while continuing to scream. The officers can

be heard to shout “stop resisting!” multiple times as plaintiff

continues to swear and kick. The audio then cuts out as the video

shows the officers pull plaintiff out of the car and onto the

ground.

Most of what occurs next is outside the range of the video

camera. Still, two of the officers can be seen to struggle with

plaintiff on the ground for approximately fifteen seconds.

Thereafter, the two officers stand up while the third remains

outside the camera’s view. Several minutes go by, during which

time an ambulance arrives. (The ambulance cannot be seen on the

video, but its flashing lights can be seen in reflection off of

the squad car). The officers then spend several minutes struggling

to get plaintiff back into the squad car as she stands at the open

rear passenger door, then sits partially inside, screaming

obscenities at the officers.1 Finally, the officers get plaintiff

into the car and drive away.

Plaintiff was charged with multiple felony offenses based on

the events of March 7, 2015. She ultimately pled guilty to a

misdemeanor charge of battery, admitting that she kicked Officer

Lyons, and a misdemeanor charge of domestic battery, admitting

that she struck Natasha.

II.

Summary judgment is appropriate when the pleadings,

depositions, admissions, and other evidence of record show that

“there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the

movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ.

P. 56(a); Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317, 322 (1986). I

must consider the record as a whole and construe all facts in the

light most favorable to plaintiff. Payne v. Pauley, 337 F.3d 767

(7th Cir. 2003). The Supreme Court has added a caveat, however,

that the non-movant’s version should not be credited when it is

clearly contradicted by a video recording capturing events that is

in the record. Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 380-81 (2007).

Defendants argue that the dash cam recordings, together with

plaintiff’s guilty pleas and her admissions in conjunction with

1 The audio device that captured the beginning of the interaction

remains off-line, but some audio can be heard at this point, which

I assume was recorded by a device within Officer Gullifor’s squad

car.

those pleas, establish as a matter of law that the force the

officers used in the course of her arrest was reasonable.

Plaintiff does not dispute that the dash cam footage “partially

depict[s] some of the events in question,” but she insists that it

does not discredit her version of the facts, and that if her

version is accepted, a jury could find that the force the officers

used was excessive.

It bears emphasis that plaintiff does not challenge the

legality of her arrest (other than the force the officers used),

and indeed, she concedes that “a claim...for false arrest or

malicious prosecution would not lie in this case.” Pl.’s Resp., DN

62 at 2 n. 1. This is important because “[a]n officer who has the

right to arrest an individual also has the right to use some

degree of physical force or threat of force to effectuate the

arrest.” Williams v. Brooks, 809 F.3d 936, 944 (7th Cir. 2016). By

conceding that the officers had a right to arrest her, plaintiff

distills the inquiry down to a single question: was the force the

officers used reasonable under the circumstances? To answer that

question, I consider several factors, including “the severity of

the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat

to the safety of the officers or others, and whether [she] is

actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by

flight.” Id. (quoting Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989)).

The first Graham factor cuts in defendants’ favor. The

undisputed record shows that the reason the officers took

plaintiff into custody was her suspected involvement in a domestic

battery—a violent crime. Plaintiff insists that she was not under

arrest when she got into Officer Lyons’s squad car and emphasizes

that the officers neither restrained her nor patted her down at

that time. But plaintiff does not explain how her arrest status is

relevant to the first Graham factor, which focuses on the nature

of the suspected crime. At all events, plaintiff was clearly in

police custody at least as of the time Officer Lyons refused her

request to return to her sister’s house, see Terry v. Ohio, 392

U.S. 1, 19 n. 16 (1968) (seizure occurs when officer “has in some

way restrained the liberty of a citizen”), and she does not

challenge either the lawfulness of her detention or the officers’

authority to arrest her and place her in handcuffs.

Moreover, even assuming that the officers did not know

whether plaintiff was the aggressor or the victim in the suspected

domestic battery, that ambiguity at most neutralizes the weight of

the first Graham factor in defendants’ favor; it does not tip the

balance in plaintiff’s direction. Meanwhile, the second and third

factors—plaintiff’s physical aggression towards the officers and

her active resistance to their attempts to restrain her—are firmly

in defendants’ favor. Indeed, even accepting plaintiff’s

characterization of her demeanor while riding in Officer Lyons’s

squad car, the dash cam evidence establishes beyond reasonable

dispute that by the time the officers attempted to restrain her,

she was screaming and kicking at them and thrashing on the ground

as they tried to handcuff her.

Plaintiff correctly observes that the videotape does not show

a complete picture of the events. Still, any reasonable factfinder

viewing that evidence would have to conclude that plaintiff

actively resisted the officers’ efforts to gain control over her.

The Seventh Circuit acknowledges that an individual who resists

arrest can pose “an immediate threat” to arresting officers.

Williams, 809 F.3d at 944 (affirming summary judgment of no

excessive force where officers pushed plaintiff against his car

and handcuffed him after he refused to comply with commands to

turn around and put his hands behind his back during a traffic

stop). Moreover, when considering the reasonableness of the force

used, courts must “remain cognizant of the fact that police

officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in

circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.”

Id. (citations omitted). Here, plaintiff’s kicking at the officers

warranted the use of some force to ensure their own safety in the

course of an arrest plaintiff does not claim was otherwise

unlawful.

Moreover, the force plaintiff describes—pulling her out of

the car and onto the ground, placing their knees on her back, and

pulling at her arms to handcuff her—cannot reasonably be compared

to the force officers used in most of the authorities she cites.

In Phillips v. Community Insurance Corp., 678 F.3d 513 (7th Cir.

2012), for example, officers shot at a passively resisting, semi-

conscious suspect with a “shoulder-fired, semi-automatic firearm

that fires polyurethane bullets with a force equivalent to a .44

magnum pistol.” Id. at 518. And in Cyrus v. Town of Mukwonago, 624

F.3d 856 (7th Cir. 2010), officers repeatedly deployed a Taser on

a mentally-ill trespasser they knew to be unarmed, including while

two officers held him face-down while he lay passively on the

ground. Unlike in these cases, plaintiff does not claim that the

officers used a firearm, a Taser, or any other weapon on her, nor

does she suggest what lesser force the officers might have used to

gain control over her, given the nature of her active resistance.

It is true that in Payne v. Pauley, 337 F.3d 767 (7th Cir.

2003), the Seventh Circuit reversed summary judgment for the

defendant in view of the plaintiff’s testimony that three officers

“grabbed,” “jerked,” “slammed,” and “forced” her arm and wrist

into handcuffs in the course of a half-hour struggle to arrest

her, during which time she claimed she did not resist. While the

force the plaintiff described in Payne is arguably comparable to

the force at issue here, the circumstances of the two cases are

different in several key respects. First, there was no videotape

in Payne to discredit the plaintiff’s claim that she “volunteered

to be arrested” and did not argue with the defendant officer or

resist arrest. Id. at 779. Accordingly, the Payne court credited

the plaintiff’s testimony that she did not yell or swear at the

officer, did not refuse to obey his orders, and did not engage in

other conduct the defendant cited as a basis for probable cause.

Second, because the Payne plaintiff challenged the existence of

probable cause, and the court concluded that the evidence

warranted a trial on that issue, the court could not properly

assume that the officers were entitled to use any force against

the plaintiff. The latter distinction also obtained in Chelios v.

Heavener, 520 F.3d 678, 689 (7th Cir. 2008) (plaintiff entitled to

trial on wrongful arrest claim). Cf. Williams, 809 F.3d at 944

(right to arrest an individual entails the right to use some force

to effectuate arrest). Here, as noted above, plaintiff disclaims

any argument that the arrest itself was wrongful.2 And the

videotape evidence “blatantly contradict[s]” plaintiff’s testimony

2 Indeed, a claim for wrongful arrest on the facts here would

presumably be barred by Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994). I

am not persuaded, however, that her excessive force claim is Heck-

barred. A judgment in her favor on this claim is not necessarily

incompatible with her guilty pleas, nor does it rest on factual

allegations that conflict with her admissions in connection with

those pleas. See McCann v. Neilsen, 466 F.3d 619 (7th Cir. 2006)

(excessive force claim not incompatible with the plaintiff’s

conviction for aggravated assault of a peace officer); VanGilder

v. Baker, 435 F.3d 689, 692 (7th Cir. 2006) (rejecting an

application of Heck that would “imply that once a person resists

law enforcement, he has invited the police to inflict any reaction

or retribution they choose, while forfeiting the right to sue for

damages”).

that she remained calm and did not yell or kick at the officers as

they tried to remove her from Officer Lyons’s squad car, Williams,

809 F.3d at 942, and establishes that she actively resisted arrest

in a manner that a reasonable jury would find justified the force

she claims the officers used.

Til.

Because I conclude based on the foregoing that no

constitutional violation occurred, I need not proceed further on

the issue of qualified immunity. Defendants are entitled to

summary judgment.

ENTER ORDER:

Che $ Butler

Elaine E. Bucklo

United States District Judge

Dated: May 16, 2018

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