

A very drunken St. Patrick's Day in 2014 turned into a incident of excessive force at the hands of BART police according to a lawsuit that was just settled by BART earlier this month, to the tune of $1.35 million, as the East Bay Times reports.

The case, which SFist noted last year, featured body camera footage at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin showing a scuffle in which former model Megan Sheehan of San Francisco had her hands pulled behind her back by two officers, at which point she very quickly hit the ground face-first with an audible thud. As blood starts pooling around her head, an officer can be heard saying "You might want medical."

The BART police account of the incident details how Sheehan was drunk and disorderly, refused to comply with orders to stop rifling through her purse, and flicked a hair tie at an officer after she was told she couldn't hold on to it. BART Officer Nolan Pianta, who wrote up a report on the incident, said that Sheehan punched him, and that it was then that she was restrained and the officers "guided her to the ground." That of course is well contradicted by the footage, which was likely instrumental in the large settlement.

As Sheehan said at the time that the suit was filed last spring, "I should have never gotten that drunk, but also there are ways to detain someone and not break their face."

The incident began, as the AP recuonts again, when BART police found Sheehan publicly intoxicated at Lake Merritt Station on March 17, 2014. She was arrested on suspicion of public intoxication and resisting arrest, and it was in the lobby of the jail that the incident occurred, at which point Sheehan was left unconscious on the floor.

An Oakland police officer was also involved in the moment Sheehan hit the floor, holding one of her arms, and the OPD was named in the original suit, though it's unclear whether the OPD will bear any further responsibility or make a separate settlement.

BART issued a statement saying in part, "We hold ourselves to high standards of professionalism, and can and will do better to ensure incidents like this do not happen in the future."

Sheehan's lawyer, Lizabeth de Vries, issued her own statement saying, "When you have cases like this that show videos that are so dramatic, we hope that it will set a standard and hopefully provide some training material for what not to do in law enforcement."

Below, the original video, shown from various angles.



Previously: Model Whose Face Was Slammed To The Ground During Arrest Now Suing BART, Oakland Police