# Alexander v. Round Lake Park

> District Court, N.D. Illinois · May 16, 2018

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/10138528

## Case

- **Court:** District Court, N.D. Illinois
- **Decided:** May 16, 2018
- **Opinion:** 100trialcourt
- **Cited by:** 0 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases.
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/10138528

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- 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”
- 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

## Opinion text

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

12

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/10138528. Public record. Not legal advice.