Background: City of Brentwood Police Department (Facebook). Inset: Talmika Bates (KGO/YouTube).
A California woman won nearly $1 million after settling with the Brentwood Police Department four years after a K-9 officer sicced his dog on her, leaving her with devastating wounds to her scalp.
The lawsuit against Brentwood Police Officer Ryan Rezentes alleged that Talmika Bates’ screams to release the police dog Marco, an 85-pound German Shepherd, were ignored, and the attack left Bates “bloody and mangled with large chunks of her scalp missing,” her attorneys said in a news release on Nov. 15. She required surgery to repair her scalp and was diagnosed with PTSD and a mild traumatic brain injury. The city of Brentwood awarded Bates $967,000, her attorneys said in a statement.
Brentwood Police Chief Timothy Herbert said in a statement that the settlement was agreed upon “to avoid further litigation and appeal costs.”
Bates and two others were suspected of shoplifting approximately $10,000 in merchandise from a local Ulta Beauty store in February 2020. When the group allegedly fled the scene in a getaway vehicle, they collided with a Brentwood Police car and then fled again on foot. Ryan Rezentes — a K-9 officer who was off-duty at the time — was asked to join the search, and he sicced his German shepherd, named Marco, on Bates, who hid in a bush. Marco then bit Bates on the head and did not let go until Rezentes physically intervened.
On bodycam video from the scene, Bates — who had called her mother during the ordeal — can be heard screaming and crying while the police told her to put the phone down and come out. When she finally emerged, parts of her scalp had been ripped off.
Rezentes ordered Marco to “heel,” but according to the lawsuit, “[w]hile Marco is trained to perform a ‘verbal out,’ meaning an immediate release upon Rezentes’s command, Rezentes does not do verbal outs in real-life deployments.” Police dogs are also not trained to bite a suspect’s head or neck, however “Marco is trained to bite and hold the first body part he touches.”
The complaint also stated that Rezentes did not provide a canine warning to Bates before she was given the chance to surrender. He did not command Marco to bite, and the dog was kept on a six-foot leash while tracking the suspect. After Marco got into the bushes, Bates could be heard on the bodycam video saying, “Get the dog off!” The complaint alleged that Marco “came from behind and bit onto the back of Bates’s head, pulling and dragging her backwards onto the ground.”
Bates, still on the phone with her mother, can be heard crying, “My whole brain,” “Mama, the dog,” “my whole brain, mama,” and “my whole brain is bleeding.”
Eventually, Rezentes gave Marco the order to let go. Bates exited the bush making it clear that she was unarmed and with the assistance of other officers, she stood up.
The injuries to Bates’s scalp were so severe that her skull was exposed. According to the complaint, she underwent “surgical tissue rearrangement and laceration repair, and was discharged later that day.” She continued to experience symptoms including “intense and frequent headaches,” “dizziness, vertigo, ringing in her ears, and sensitivity to light,” and “issues with short-term memory, attention, concentration, multitasking, information processing, and stuttering.” She also reported being depressed and having nightmares. She was diagnosed with “mild diffuse traumatic brain injury, mild post-traumatic brain syndrome, and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Prior to the settlement, a federal judge ruled that the amount of time Rezentes allowed Marco to bite Bates could be seen as excessive force. The same judge also ruled that even though Rezentes was off-duty, he was still authorized to make an arrest using Marco.
Bates pleaded no contest to resisting arrest and misdemeanor grand theft. Rezentes retired from the department. The Brentwood Police Department currently has no active K-9 officers.
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