San Jose poised to settle false imprisonment claim against police



By Tracey Kaplan

SAN JOSE -- Ammir Umar was yanked out of his pre-calculus class at Evergreen Community College three years ago on suspicion of selling people empty boxes stuffed with wood he claimed contained TVs, and locked up for almost a month.
The 18-year-old faced more than six years in prison on grand theft and other charges. But prosecutors released Umar 29 days later and dropped the charges after he proved he'd been working at Wal-Mart at the time and that the sworn affidavit by the lead investigator contained misleading statements.
Now, the San Jose City Council is poised Tuesday to approve paying Umar and his lawyers $190,000 to settle a lawsuit he filed claiming those statements by Sgt. Craig Storlie led to his false arrest and imprisonment.
"I hope this is a wake-up call for SJPD," said Umar, 22, who now works at a car rental agency and hopes to open a body shop someday. "I was terrified. I told them I had nothing to do with it and they said, 'If you keep lying, you'll do more time.' "
Storlie is currently one of the two officers in charge of the Police Department's Internal Affairs unit, which investigates allegations of misconduct against cops. He also is one of two chief investigators in the rape-allegations case against officer Geoffrey Graves.
A settlement is not an admission of fault; in risky cases, the City Attorney's Office will advise settling to reduce the city's financial exposure. As a result, Storlie's connection to the Umar matter is not expected to have any effect on Graves' case.
"We don't believe Storlie was negligent and certainly not deceptive," City Attorney Rick Doyle said.
But the settlement comes after U.S. District Judge Howard R. Lloyd denied the city's request to reject the case for lack of merit rather than allowing it to proceed to trial. The judge ruled that "a genuine dispute exists as to whether Storlie engaged in judicial deception causing Umar to be arrested pursuant to an invalid warrant and without probable cause."
San Jose has paid about $27.8 million in the past 10 fiscal years ending in July to settle lawsuits. Claims against police account for about $18 million of that, or 65 percent, according to the City Attorney's Office.
In his six-page order, the judge laid out the series of events that led to the two misleading statements in the affidavit. During the robbery, one of the thieves gave victims a phone number he said they could use to reach him if they had any problems with the purported TV. Storlie tracked the number to a man named Umar Well, who turns out to be linked to paternity cases involving two children, including Ammir Umar.
But Ammir Umar has had virtually nothing to do with Well, who is his father, since Well left the family when Umar was 5 years old. When Umar was 10, he and his younger sister were put into foster care and eventually adopted because of his mother's mental problems, he said.
Although the phone number was linked to Umar Well, Storlie claimed in the sworn affidavit that it was "registered" to Ammir Umar. Well, who is considerably older than the robbers described by victims, is apparently known by several aliases, including Amir Umar, which he spells differently than his son.
Then a photo lineup using five DMV photos, including one of Ammir Umar -- but not of Umar Well -- was put together. Storlie claimed in the affidavit that a witness positively identified Ammir Umar by recognizing his smile.
However, the witness asserted in a sworn declaration submitted in the lawsuit that he only said Umar's smile resembled that of one of the suspects. The witness claimed he repeatedly told Storlie and another unidentified officer that Ammir Umar was not the guy who swindled him. He said the swindler's complexion was "much darker" than Umar's.
Had that information been included in the affidavit, the judge wrote, "A neutral magistrate may well have not found that probable cause existed, and the warrant would not have issued."