By Henry K. Lee
A man filed a lawsuit Tuesday
accusing San Francisco police officers of wrongfully arresting him and forcibly
taking his infant son from him after stopping him for riding his bike with his
child strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn carrier.
Takuro Hashitaka said he and
his then-10-month-old son, Moku, were riding in a bike lane on Eighth Street
headed to a Trader Joe’s two blocks from his South of Market home on Dec. 13.
The infant was strapped to
Hashitaka in a Baby Bjorn and “further secured by a sweatshirt that had been
modified into a traditional baby carrier garment with a hole for Moku’s head,”
said the federal civil rights suit filed in U.S. District Court in San
Francisco.
Officers Anthony Bautista and
Brendan Caraway came up behind them in the bike lane and “came close” to
hitting them, the suit says.
Caraway asked over the patrol
cruiser’s loudspeaker why the baby wasn’t wearing a helmet, and Hashitaka,
“unaware of a requirement for a baby to wear a bike helmet,” asked the officer
“what the authority was for this,” the suit says.
The officers activated their
lights and stopped Hashitaka at a gas station at Eighth and Harrison streets,
the suit says.
The officers grabbed
Hashitaka’s wrists, telling him he was being arrested and that Child Protective
Services would take his son, according to the suit. Other officers arrived and
took Hashitaka to the ground and choked him until he lost consciousness, the
suit says.
Bautista began cutting
Hashitaka’s sweatshirt with a knife, the suit says. Hashitaka said he came to
and was again choked to unconsciousness. The “terrified baby” was taken to CPS
by police, who never tried to contact Hashitaka’s wife despite his pleas, the
suit says. Police never told his wife that her son was being taken to CPS,
Hashitaka said.
Police arrested Hashitaka on
suspicion of child endangerment, resisting arrest and a vehicle code violation,
but prosecutors never filed charges, said his attorney, Rachel Lederman.
The California vehicle code
requires that all children wear bike helmets and are properly restrained in
their own seat or in a trailer towed by a bike.
Lederman said questions over
whether the child should have been in a baby carrier while on a bike “has
nothing to do with whether the baby should be taken to Child Protective
Services, not given to his mother or why the father would be choked until he passed
out, twice, and taken to jail.”
Moku is a “very loved and
well-cared-for baby, and obviously this was a pretty traumatic experience for
the baby as well as the parents,” Lederman said.
The suit names San Francisco,
Police Chief Greg Suhr, Caraway, Bautista and other officers and seeks
unspecified damages. The defendants have not responded to the suit in court,
but the city previously rejected a claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, filed over
the incident.
Police declined to comment
Tuesday, and Matt Dorsey, spokesman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said he
couldn’t discuss the suit because he had not yet seen it.
