A woman who had her scalp torn off by a Brentwood, California police dog is filing a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the city and police department caused her severe injury because of police negligence and violation of policy.
Talmika Bates was brutally attacked by a police K-9 in February 2020 when she and three other people suspected of stealing cosmetics from a beauty store fled from police.
Bates, who was 24-years-old at the time, had run into a field and hid among some bushes when Brentwood police Officer Ryan Rezentes released a German shepherd police dog. The dog found Bates and attacked her ferociously, immediately sinking its teeth into the unarmed woman’s head, according to the lawsuit.
The suit alleges that Rezentes, “stood by and watched his canine viciously maul the young victim” as she screamed and cried in pain.
“Help me! The dog is biting me,” BAtes can be heard screaming in the body camera video. “My whole brain is bleeding!”
Instead of immediately pulling the dog off of Bates, police can be seen in the body camera video standing near the bushes telling Bates to crawl out to them. She eventually crawls out, covered in blood and revealing massive head wounds. During the attack, the dog tore chunks of Bates’ scalp from her head, “exposing bone and tissue,” according to her lawsuit.
Bates was transported to a nearby hospital where “surgeons were able to reattach her scalp,” the lawsuit states.
She pleaded no contest to grand theft and resisting a police officer charges, both misdemeanors, according to court records.
Bates is now seeking monetary damages; her lawsuit alleges that Rezentes used excessive force and violated her constitutional rights. The suit also names the City of Brentwood as a defendant.
“This unbridled use of an apparent blood thirsty dog to track, hunt and then attack an unarmed fleeing woman as she lay in a set of bushes harkens back to the days of slavery and slave catchers,” the lawsuit says.
“This is an example of the way in which police do not look at Black and Brown people, or criminal suspects, as humans,” Adante Pointer, one of Bates’s lawyers, told The Washington Post. “Instead, they are numb to … the pain their use of excessive force causes.”
The suit does not ask for a specific sum of money, but instead “general damages in a sum according to proof,” plus legal and medical costs, and “such other and further relief as the Court deems just and proper.”
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
