Daria Jalali: 'Laughing' cop faces jail for standing by as colleague brutally arrested dementia patient Karen Garner
LOVELAND, COLORADO: A former Colorado police officer has been arrested and sentenced to jail 45 days in jail after she was unable to stop a colleague from roughing up Karen Garner in 2020. A bodycam video revealed Karen Garner, 73, a dementia patient, being harassed by a cop while a colleague laughed. Daria Jalali, the 28-year-old cop, received three years of probation in addition to jail time. Jalali pleaded guilty to a charge of failure to intervene with an officer using excessive force, which is a crime committed by lawmakers and is a part of a reform bill that was passed during protests over racial injustice and police brutality in 2020.
New York Post reported that Jalali resigned as an officer with the Loveland Police Department in April 2021, along with two other colleagues, and faced up to 60 days behind bars. The arrest of Garner took place in June 2020 and made it to the national headlines. She was arrested by another cop, officer Austin Hopp, after leaving a Walmart without paying $14 worth of items which included a candy bar, a Pepsi, and a t-shirt. A video captured on a police body camera last year showed Garner repeatedly saying she was trying to go home while picking flowers.
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After the old lady turned away from Hopp, the officer grabbed her arm, pushed her to the ground, and handcuffed her. He further shoved the 80-pound elderly dementia patient against the hood of his car. When she tried to turn around, the officer bent her left arm up near her head. When Garner began to slump toward the ground, Jalali arrived and said, "Stand up! We're not going to hold you." The dementia-struck old woman suffered a dislocated shoulder and a broken elbow during the brutal arrest by the two cops.
In the video from the Loveland police station released by Garner's lawyer, several cops were seen laughing, joking, and exchanging fist bumps around her arrest. Jalali was caught saying, "It's just like live TV. Body cams are my favorite thing to watch, I could watch live stream body cams all day." Anna Geige, Jalali's lawyer said Loveland police and another department let the cop stay on her job even though she has a pattern of poor performance recorded in her personnel files. She also said that a neuropsychological evaluation has shown that Jalali did not have the "psychological makeup" to act with the precision and awareness that are expected of police officers.
The judge after watching the body camera video footage said, "She just sounds out of it and terrified to me. The fact that two law enforcement officers couldn’t comprehend that is incomprehensible to me."