A Holyoke woman has filed a federal civil lawsuit against the city of Northampton and two of its police officers related to an arrest on April 4, 2023, when she was stopped for a broken headlight and then forcefully thrown to the ground and peppered sprayed.
A police dashboard camera captured footage of the arrest, and the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office later declined to prosecute the criminal charges filed against the Holyoke woman.
Video of the arrest led to condemnation by elected officials even as the actions of the two officers involved were deemed “reasonable and appropriate” by an outside investigation.
Marisol Driouech, 61, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday and the Hispanic woman claims that two city officers, John Sellew and Jonathan Bartlett, harmed her and violated her civil rights during her arrest.
The lawsuit claims the arrest was part of a “pattern and practice by officers of stopping and using force disproportionately against Hispanic individuals” that Northampton officials were aware of and failed to stop.
The lawsuit names the city of Northampton, Sellew and Bartlett as defendants, and seeks unspecified damages to be determined by a jury trial.
An independent investigation by Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting, a Quincy-based firm that conducts investigations for local and state agencies, found that Sellew and Bartlett behaved appropriately and did not misuse force, MassLive previously reported.
MassLive reached out to Northampton Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra for comment. Requests for comment were sent to Sellew and Bartlett.
In September, MassLive reported that city officials received a letter from Driouech’s attorney, Dana Goldblatt, seeking monetary compensation due to injuries suffered from the arrest by Sellew and Bartlett.
The video of Driouech’s arrest is below.
The lawsuit filed in Springfield’s federal courthouse claims that Driouech’s federal and state civil rights were violated, that the city of Northampton negligently failed to train and/or supervise Sellew and Bartlett, and that Sellew used the criminal-complaint process for an “ulterior or illegitimate purpose.”
The lawsuit also claims Sellew defamed Driouech orally and in his police report of the arrest when he said that she was “resistant and violent, had assaulted him, resisted arrest, and attempted to flee the scene.”
The two officers are accused of battery when they applied force during the arrest.
In court filings, Driouech is described as less than five feet tall, and whose first language is Spanish.
She speaks English with a noticeable and recognizable Spanish accent and sometimes struggles to understand and communicate in English, according to the lawsuit.
What happened during the arrest?
The Holyoke woman was pulled over for a broken taillight minutes after midnight on April 4 on King Street and was pulled out of her car and thrown to the ground by Officer Sellew for reportedly attempting to drive away, according to a police report, court documents and footage of the incident.
A second officer, Bartlett, sprayed her twice with pepper spray before handcuffing her as seen in the video.
Minutes before her arrest, she pulled out of McDonald’s with food intended for a DoorDash delivery, she told police.
After Sellew identified himself as a Northampton police officer and asked for Driouech’s license and registration, Driouech, whose first language is not English, repeatedly told him she didn’t understand.
At one point she told Sellew she wanted the police there. As Sellew raised his voice, Driouech said, “no me grites” — “don’t scream at me” in Spanish.
Over the course of two minutes from when he began speaking with her, Sellew started yelling and eventually began to pull Driouech out of the car.
“No me toques,” Driouech said in Spanish — “Don’t touch me.”
“Get out of your [expletive] vehicle,” Sellew yelled as he pulled at her and she screamed. He eventually took her to the ground.
“Someone help me,” Driouech screamed from the ground and continued to scream as a second police car arrived. Bartlett emerged from the police car and jumped in to assist Sellew and sprayed Driouech twice with pepper spray.
Both officers handcuffed Driouech and Bartlett pulled her up and led her to a police cruiser as she asked them repeatedly “clean my eyes.”
In Sellew’s report of the arrest, he wrote that Driouech failed to pull over for about a quarter-mile after turning on the cruiser’s blue lights. He wrote that she became “agitated” when he asked for her license and that she began to talk loudly.
“She began to state her Door Dash speech again and acted as if she did not understand what was going on,” Sellew wrote. He wrote that after ordering her to get out of the car, she began to roll up her window and reached for the gear shift.
“I immediately grabbed the door handle of the vehicle and opened it, again ordering her out the vehicle two more times,” Sellew wrote. “I reached in, unlocked her seatbelt, and began to pull Marisol out of her vehicle.”
A struggle ensued to get her out of the car, and Sellew wrote that she managed to grab hold of his baton. He wrote that Bartlett arrived once he pinned Driouech down on the ground and that he twice used pepper spray on the Holyoke woman before she was handcuffed.
Driouech was later brought to the hospital and she suffered several injuries including dizziness; burning in her eyes, hands and face; bruising and swelling in her face, arms, legs, back, and chest; difficulty walking; numbness in her extremities; flashbacks and anxiety; sleeplessness; inability to work, according to the lawsuit.
Northampton police charged her with assault and battery attempt to disarm a police officer, assault and battery on a police officer, resisting arrest and refusing to identify herself to a police officer.
All of those charges were dropped by the District Attorney’s office, leaving Driouech with just a $35 fine for a lights violation, which she paid, according to court documents.
Northwestern District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Laurie Loisel previously provided a statement to MassLive:
“After reviewing the evidence in the case, and consulting with the Police Department, the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office concluded that dismissal of the criminal charges, and a responsible finding with a fine on the civil motor vehicle violation, was in the best interests of justice.”
MassLive published a video in August that features a conversation between Driouech and a police translator in which Driouech offers her version of events. The video, with translated subtitles, is published below.
‘Anti-Hispanic bias,’ lawsuit claims
Driouech’s lawsuit claims her arrest followed years of a “pattern and practice by officers of stopping and using force disproportionately against Hispanic individuals,” and claims city officials were aware of the practice but took “no corrective action … to address the problem.”
In the letter by Goldblatt, the Holyoke woman’s attorney, to city officials last September, she said the pattern has been present since at least 2015.
“In the period before the above-described incident, then-Lieutenant Robert Powers of the NPD publicly expressed his belief that there was only one Hispanic person in Holyoke without a criminal record,” Goldblatt wrote.
In 2014, Lt. Robert Powers was listed as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston by Timothy Turley, who failed out of the police academy and filed a civil complaint against Powers, the Western Massachusetts Police Academy and four others who worked there.
Powers previously served as an instructor at the academy and Turley alleged that Powers advised students that Massachusetts police officers could issue citations to “ethnically altered vehicles all day long.”
A 2021 investigation by the Daily Hampshire Gazette of internal affairs in the Northampton Police Department found that Powers admitted to telling former-Police Chief Jody Kasper the comment about there only being one Hispanic in Holyoke without a record.
After Powers admitted to making the comments, he was later promoted to the rank of captain, as Goldblatt notes in her letter. In Driouech’s lawsuit, she claims, “The City took no corrective action to purge the department of the anti-Hispanic bias that Mr. Powers was actively spreading throughout his tenure.”
“The officers of the NPD continue to stop non-white individuals, including individuals of Hispanic ethnicity, disproportionately as compared to white individuals, and to treat them contemptuously as ‘ethnics’ in ‘ethnically modified cars,’” Goldblatt wrote.
What Northampton officials said after Driouech’s arrest
In a previous interview with MassLive, both Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra and former Northampton Chief of Police Jody Kasper expressed their disapproval that the arrest escalated the way it did. Kasper departed Northampton police on Jan. 1 to become Nantucket’s chief of police.
“This should not have happened,” Kasper said. “Our community expects and deserves that we meet certain professional standards and in this case, we did not meet those standards.”
Since the external investigation did not sustain any charges against Sellew — meaning he did not break any laws or go against department policies — it can be “very challenging to go against that finding,” Kasper said.
“The approach this officer took was completely unacceptable,” said Alex Jarrett, a Northampton city councilor. “He escalated the situation at every step. This incident has reduced the level of trust that the community has in the (Northampton Police Department).”
State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, a Northampton Democrat, said Driouech’s arrest shows there remains a discrepancy between the vision and reality of public safety.
“The video underscores the disconnect between what policing is and what people want policing to be,” Sabadosa said. “From across the political spectrum, local residents have been reaching out to express their outrage. Legislators can help guide the way but there is a need for a culture shift that de-escalates situations rather than making them worse.”