An 18-year-old woman filed a lawsuit against the San Bernardino Police Department, accusing officers of assaulting her and violating her civil rights.<\/p>\n
Erin Marie Cowser alleges in a lawsuit filed Friday that a police officer handcuffed her and threw her face-first to the ground during a May 2025 incident.<\/p>\n
Cowser accused the same officer of hitting his face against the metal floor of his patrol vehicle. She said she suffered concussions and memory loss as well as other injuries, including cuts and bruises on her face and body.<\/p>\n
“I remember being scared \u2013 and then I don’t remember anything,” she said in a written statement. \u201cI woke up hurt, confused, and the things I was told, I later learned, about what happened to me were not true.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowser alleges in the lawsuit that the officer and his partner lied multiple times about the use of force that led to his injuries, an allegation the department denies.<\/p>\n
A San Bernardino Police Department spokesperson could not be reached for comment. But in a statement released two days after the incident, the department said the officer was attempting to handcuff the teen.<\/p>\n
“The officer was only able to get one of her arms into the cuffs when she began to actively move away and attempt to move away from the officer when the takedown maneuver was used,” the statement said.<\/p>\n
Cowser’s attorney Tony Jaramilla said in a written statement that the police department “failed to correct the false story” even when video proved the officer was lying.<\/p>\n
Jaramilla said the incident was captured on officers’ body-worn cameras and witness video. <\/p>\n
“The lawsuit alleges that after the incident, officers falsely claimed that Ms. Cowser’s injuries were caused by other teenagers, repeated those false claims to her family while she was hospitalized, and continued the story internally,” Jaramilla said in the statement. <\/p>\n
According to the lawsuit, Cowser, who was 17 at the time, was with her friends at Food 4 Less, located at Rialto Avenue and North E Street in San Bernardino, when a group of teenagers began attacking other youths inside.<\/p>\n
Cowser was leaving a grocery store when one of the teens in the group attacked her. According to the lawsuit, a security guard said he saw about a dozen teenagers and used pepper spray to stop an attack on Cowser and another young man.<\/p>\n
Shortly afterward, San Bernardino police officers Jackson Tubbs and Cynthia Guillen arrived and saw Cowser wandering across the parking lot to talk to a friend.<\/p>\n
L.A. civil rights lawyer Tony J. Jaramilla said body-worn cameras captured the excessive force used by the San Bernardino police officer.<\/p>\n
(Tony J. Jaramilla)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
“Without any warning, probable cause or legal justification, (Tubbs) ran up to Plaintiff and without any explanation, violently grabbed her bag, pushed her backwards and pinned both of her arms behind her back,” the lawsuit states.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit says Cowser was never told he was under arrest or given any orders to follow while he was handcuffed. <\/p>\n
At the time, San Bernardino police said Cowser was arrested for trespassing and attempting to fight others.<\/p>\n
“This arrest follows a contact for similar circumstances at a nearby transit center earlier that day,” the department’s statement said. <\/p>\n
According to the lawsuit, witnesses told officers that Cowser had been attacked before their arrival and that he had done nothing wrong. <\/p>\n
“As Plaintiff turned his body to listen to his friend, Officer Tubbs, without warning, performed a forceful hip toss, sending Plaintiff flying into the air and slamming his face onto the asphalt pavement with such force that his legs flew above his head like a rag doll,” the lawsuit states. <\/p>\n
According to the lawsuit, the fall caused Cowser “a loss of consciousness and memory along with a concussion, a deep open wound under his chin, a large bruise on the left side of his face and bleeding from the wound”. <\/p>\n
The lawsuit also alleges that officers did not provide immediate medical care. <\/p>\n
A supervisor was called to the scene, photographs of Cowser’s injuries were taken and he was taken to a local hospital for medical evaluation, the department said in its statement.<\/p>\n
On the way to the hospital, Tubbs called Cowser’s mother, Tanya Brownridge, and “told her they were taking her daughter to the hospital because of a fight with other teenagers and that ‘she had a cut on her face because of the fight.’ Guillen never spoke to him to make amends. This lie was captured on body-worn video,\u201d the lawsuit alleges.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/ca-times.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/d0dd345\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/1536x2048+0+0\/resize\/320x427!\/format\/webp\/quality\/75\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F17%2Ff9%2F71b5180a4fecaf8d05f893483220%2Fme-erin-cowser-san-bernardino-police-lawsuit-02.JPG)
<\/picture>\nErin Cowser, 18, said in her lawsuit that she suffered concussion and memory loss, as well as other injuries including cuts and scratches on her face and body.<\/p>\n
(Tony J. Jaramilla)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
According to the lawsuit, Cowser suffered “a concussion, closed head injury, blunt head injury, blunt facial injury” and other injuries.<\/p>\n
Jaramilla said in the lawsuit that Cowser suffered a traumatic experience and is suffering from “severe emotional distress, anxiety, humiliation and loss of enjoyment of life.” <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An 18-year-old woman filed a lawsuit against the San Bernardino Police Department, accusing officers of assaulting her and violating her civil rights. Erin Marie Cowser alleges in a lawsuit filed Friday that a police officer handcuffed her and threw her face-first to the ground during a May 2025 incident. Cowser accused the same officer of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[16307,605,13324,2248,157,1850,453,8688],"class_list":["post-41981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bible-verse","tag-bernardino","tag-ground","tag-handcuffed","tag-lawsuit","tag-police","tag-san","tag-teen","tag-threw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41983,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41981\/revisions\/41983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}