Officer arresting her called her sarcastic and uncooperative
A Hazel Dell woman accused a pair of Clark County jail guards of excessive violence this week for allegedly tackling and injuring her after a sarcastic remark.
Ronni Logan, 37, was being booked on suspicion of drunken driving Monday morning when she told an interviewer that her aliases included “Osama Bin Laden” and “Barack Obama,” she said.
“I was kind of stressed out,” she said. “Trying to lighten the mood.”
The interviewer was not amused, according to Logan. She said he ordered two female guards to “take her down.”
Logan said they grabbed her by the hair and pushed her legs from under her, sending her to the jail floor and breaking her nose. She said they then hoisted her, still handcuffed, and threw her against a nearby bench.
“Do you have anything smart to say now?” she recalled one saying.
In his report on Logan, Vancouver Police Officer Timothy Huycke described Logan as “sarcastic, argumentative and uncooperative” “from the time of arrest.”
“Examples include asking her if she had any aliases and receiving the answer, ‘Yeah, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush,’” Huycke wrote. He did not cite other examples of misbehavior.
Logan said she’d also refused to give officers her Social Security number, but hadn’t been sarcastic until they asked about her aliases.
“It was kind of the first names that popped into my head,” Logan recalled Tuesday. “Probably wasn’t the best thing for me to do.”
After the takedown, Logan said, she began sobbing and did not push the officers further.
Logan, who works as a waitress in east Vancouver, said Tuesday that she’d drunk one beer with a friend Sunday night before driving home.
Hours later, she said, she was pulled over for speeding up Main Street.
Huycke’s police report differed from Logan’s story. He wrote that Logan had smelled of alcohol and had drunk “two beverages” “just prior” to driving.
The report said her breath test reported blood alcohol content of .195, far above the legal limit of .08.
Logan, who said she weighs 105 pounds, had never been to jail before.
“I wasn’t very happy about being arrested, but I was not resisting,” she said Tuesday. “I had been sarcastic with the guard, but not combative.
“I definitely understand that these guards are not there to make you like them,” she added. “I can understand if I had been physically resisting anything. I was standing there in handcuffs and didn’t make a physical movement at all.”
Victoria MacKenzie, a custody sergeant for the sheriff’s office, said the complaint Logan filed Tuesday is “in the hands of internal affairs.”
One of two sergeants in the internal affairs office will then decide whether it merits further investigation.
No video of the incident is available, MacKenzie said, because the jail does not record from its closed-circuit cameras.
Jeff Barrar, a Vancouver defense lawyer whose firm handles most of Clark County’s indigent defense cases, said he’d be startled if Logan received such physical punishment without also showing some physical resistance.
“Those people that work in that environment are constantly being verbally harassed,” Barrar said of custody officers.
“We handle a large number of cases in and out of there every year, and complaints about being mishandled in there are very rare,” Barrar said.
According to Huycke’s report, a nurse examined Logan after the incident.
“She was fine,” Huycke wrote.
After being released late Monday morning, Logan said, she visited an urgent care clinic to have her nose treated.
Logan said Tuesday that she plans to submit a tort claim to the county, but only for the cost of the bill for her nose.
She said she’s not sure how commonly violent “takedowns” are used to subdue sarcastic inmates. If they are, Logan said, all the worse.
“A peace officer, they should be at least trained to try and keep a situation as calm and noncombative as possible,” she said. “If that is common behavior, I would find that fairly upsetting.
“I don’t see how it could be, without anybody ever saying anything,” Logan said.
Michael Andersen: 360-735-4508 or michael.andersen@columbian.com.
