The city of Oakland has been hit with a lawsuit claiming its police officers illegally seized and destroyed two live-aboard boats in the Oakland Estuary, leaving their occupants homeless.

According to the federal lawsuit, which was served earlier this week, Oakland Police confiscated a houseboat and a sailboat during a sweep of the Jack London Aquatic Center in October 2018. The plaintiffs, 41-year-old Katherine De la Riva and 73-year-old William Allan, were not given an opportunity, as required by law, to contest the seizure or collect the boats once they were seized, their lawyers say.

“Our clients are now living in vehicles or couch-surfing,” said Oakland-based attorney EmilyRose Johns. “Where they once had homes, the city’s actions made them homeless.”

The lawsuit names the city of Oakland, two individual police officers and Sean Alexander Marine Services — the company the city allegedly contracted to destroy the boats — as defendants.

Representatives for the city and the Oakland Police Department directed questions to the city attorney’s office. Alex Katz, spokesman for the city attorney’s office, declined to comment, saying his office hadn’t yet reviewed the complaint. Sean Alexander Marine Services also declined to comment.

Overnight docking is prohibited at the Jack London Aquatic Center, which primarily is used for public boating programs, dragon boating and rowing teams.

Even so, Johns, who filed the lawsuit alongside the East Bay Community Law Center in September, said the destruction of her clients’ boats is part of a larger pattern of Oakland officials violating the rights of the city’s homeless residents. Her law firm, Siegel, Yee, Brunner & Mehta, has filed prior lawsuits on behalf of homeless Oakland residents living in tent and RV encampments that were cleared by the city.

“It just is shocking to me honestly,” Johns said, “that the city continues to take steps to minimize the rights of the homeless, to minimize the spaces they can exist in, to increase their hardship. To contribute to the crisis further by taking marginally housed people and rendering them homeless or unhoused.”

The lawsuit comes as Oakland’s homeless population is growing — swelling 47% between 2017 and 2019, according to the city’s biennial count. For those who turn to the water for an answer, it’s becoming harder to find space to dock their vessels. Not all marinas allow live-aboard boats, and those that do usually offer only a few spots.

De la Riva had been living on a houseboat she inherited from her father and docking the boat in different locations around the Bay Area. In January 2018, her motor broke and the Coast Guard towed her to the Jack London Aquatic Center. In September 2018, De la Riva secured space at a private dock in Oakland and put down a deposit, according to her lawyers. She bought a new motor for her boat and planned to move once it was installed.

Later that month, De la Riva and several others with boats at the Aquatic Center received notices telling them they had 72 hours to vacate the estuary, according to the complaint. De la Riva reached out to Officer Kaleo Albino — one of the defendants named in her lawsuit — and he said he would give her until Oct. 5 to install the motor and move, according to the suit.

Instead, on Oct. 2, Albino and other officers seized her boat, according to the lawsuit. An invoice from Sean Alexander lists De la Riva’s boat as one of six destroyed during that sweep, according to the suit. Among the items onboard that De la Riva lost were her grandmother’s ashes and her father’s watch collection.

“I’ve never been so heartbroken in my life,” De la Riva wrote in a press release. “It was the very last thing I had of my dad.”

Allan, the lawsuit’s second plaintiff, had been living aboard a sailboat he purchased in April 2018. He was working on repairs to the boat, and planned to sail to Half Moon Bay and dock there permanently when he was finished, according to the complaint. Allan told Albino about his plans, and the officer did not express disapproval, Allan’s lawyers said.

Allan was away from his boat for a few days due to an illness and did not see the 72-hour notice to vacate before his boat was destroyed, according to his lawyers.

“I am deeply depressed,” Allan wrote in the news release. “I lost all of my tools, months of toil on the boat…I lost a lot of things with sentimental value, like family pictures.”