A California mother and her two daughters who were wrongfully detained outside of a Starbucks more than three years ago finally got some justice.
A federal jury awarded $8.25 million to the family after they were unlawfully searched and detained by Alameda County sheriff’s deputies in Castro Valley, California.
The mother was taking one of her daughters to take a college math test in Berkeley, which is about 45 minutes away from the Starbucks where the incident took place. They drove all the way from Nevada as a family because her oldest daughter was transferring from a community college to UCLA. The women were not physically harmed and did cooperate with the officers.
The jury deliberated for 16 hours before reaching a verdict on the two-day trial that concluded on March 1. According to court documents obtained by Fox KTVU News, the dollar amount awarded to the family was because jurors felt their constitutional rights were stripped due to the color of their skin.
“I think that everybody recognizes we all have implicit bias,” their attorney, Craig Peters of San Francisco, said in an interview on Monday. “I have it. You have it. We’ve all got it. These officers are no different. And so, subconsciously, there was something going on that made them unreasonably suspicious of this family. I think that if this same scenario happened and these were white women, it would have played out very differently.”
The jury found Deputy Steven Holland liable for his role during the incident. In 2019, the family was sitting in the parking lot in a rental vehicle while waiting to go into a Starbucks. Holland approached them and asked, “What are you doing here?”
The mother, Aasylei Loggervale, responded, “we are waiting to go inside the Starbucks.”
Officer Holland then said that the area had been experiencing a lot of car break-ins and that is why he questioned them. The car break-ins that Holland was referring to were committed…
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