A Hispanic woman who sued the Township of Woodbridge, New Jersey, for excessive force, claiming police officers violently assaulted her as she stepped out of the shower, will receive a $197,500 settlement.
Katiria Ortiz was 30 years old on June 21, 2018, when police raided her South Amboy home, allegedly seeking to stop her from destroying evidence of drug trafficking by her ex-husband, Joshua Pardo.
Pardo had been under surveillance by the Woodbridge Police narcotics investigation unit, and was seen driving away from Ortiz’s house that morning. Police had a search warrant for Pardo and his vehicle, and tried to pull him over. Pardo fled, and an officer saw him fling a bag out of the car during the chase. That bag was later found to contain smaller baggies of cocaine.
Another officer later testified he saw Pardo appearing to make a call on his cellphone, and that the narcotics team suspected he might be calling Ortiz to alert her to hide other contraband.
What happened next has been hotly disputed by Ortiz, the police and their lawyers during a six-year legal battle.
According to her lawsuit filed in federal court in 2019, Ortiz had dropped off her 8-year-old daughter at school that morning. Pardo, whom she had divorced in 2014 and who lived with his father, had then come by to pick up an SUV she was borrowing from him to take care of a registration issue at the motor vehicle department.
About 15 minutes after he left, she said Pardo called to say he was being pulled over by police, but then the call dropped. When she called him back, he didn’t pick up. She said she then got in the shower in the bathroom off her third-floor bedroom, as she needed to get ready for work.
At that point, Woodbridge Police Detectives Juan Carlos Bonilla, Jr. and Brian Jaremczac broke into her basement door with a battering ram. The officers made their way up the stairs, allegedly kicking and throwing her three dogs against a wall “until they became docile,” the complaint says.
In a 2022 deposition, Ortiz testified that she heard her dogs “barking like crazy,” and stepped out of the still-running shower and began to pat herself dry with a towel when the bathroom door “exploded open.” She says she was then struck in the face by “something black” that was “the size of a gun,” and momentarily passed out.
When she came to, she said, she was naked on the floor, “spread eagle,” looking up at Bonilla, who was holding a gun, and Jaremczac, who was holding a battering ram. Dressed in plain clothes, they hadn’t identified themselves as police officers, and she was afraid they might be there to burglarize her home or rape her, the lawsuit said. Her nose was gushing blood.
Bonilla grabbed her and dragged her to her bed, ignoring her when she asked several times for something to wear, finally throwing her a “house gown,” she claimed. When she asked for a search warrant, the officers did not produce one, and told her, “Shut the f—k up, we don’t have to answer your questions,” she recounted.
Several more officers then arrived, and a female officer allowed Ortiz to get fully dressed, and EMS personnel tended to her bloody nose, which was broken, and to a cut on her face.
Meanwhile, several officers searched her home and, according to police reports, found a backpack with Pardo’s credit cards, a plastic bag containing cocaine residue, and $3,006 in cash wrapped in rubbed bands hidden in the toilet tank.
In her court pleadings, Ortiz insisted that she never saw Pardo’s backpack in her home, and that the $3,006 in cash was not in the toilet but in her purse inside a closet, along with an invoice for an upcoming root canal procedure.
Ortiz was arrested and charged with possession of a controlled substance, tampering, obstruction, money laundering, and throwing bodily fluids at an officer. (Bonilla claimed that she threw her blood at him, which she denied).
Ortiz was treated at a hospital for her injuries then held in jail for seven days before the charges were dismissed on May 31, 2019, the lawsuit says.
As a result of her arrest and incarceration, her daughter was removed from her and placed in her mother’s care for three months by the New Jersey Department of Children and Families Child Protection and Permanency Unit.
In her amended complaint filed on behalf of herself and her daughter in 2021, Ortiz sued Woodbridge Township and 10 police officers for excessive force and cover up, false imprisonment, assault and battery, sexual assault, denial of medical care, negligence and infliction of emotional distress, citing violation of state and federal laws.
She argued that the police officers illegally searched her home, assaulted her, detained and arrested her with no probable cause or a reasonable, good faith basis to believe she was involved with drug dealing or any other crime, then later falsified reports and lied to a grand jury to cover their tracks.
Their “objectively unreasonable, excessive and conscious shocking physical force” caused her serious bodily harm, she claimed.
She sought a jury trial to determine compensatory, consequential, special and punitive damages to address her physical injuries, impairment and disfigurement, pain and emotional distress, medical and psychological treatment, and property damage.
In their depositions and pleadings, including a Statement of Material Facts filed in support of their motion for summary judgment in September 2024, the officers named in the lawsuit disputed many elements of Ortiz’s account of the incident at her home and its aftermath.
Bonilla asserted that the narcotics team had credible information from surveillance and a confidential informant indicating that Pardo, who had been seen coming and going from her house, was dealing cocaine and living there, and that a judicial official had properly granted a search warrant of Pardo, his car and Ortiz’s home.
The officers also knew that Ortiz had been arrested in 2011 for cocaine possession, obstruction, and resisting arrest. Those charges were dismissed after Ortiz completed a pre-trial intervention program, but it gave them reason to believe she might interfere in their investigation of her ex, they said.
Bonilla said he and Det. Jaremczak were acting with “ordinary caution” and “in good faith” when, due to exigent circumstances created by Pardo’s perceived attempt to alert Ortiz of police activity, they forced entry into her home. Upon hearing running water and a person “shuffling around” in her bathroom, Bonilla said he kicked down the locked bathroom door in an effort to stop her from destroying evidence.
When he did so, the door struck Ortiz in the face, immediately causing her nose to bleed, he said. He denied striking her with a gun.
The defendants’ statement of fact notes that Ortiz filed a tort claim in September 2018 alleging that officers had slammed the door into her face, and that she said the same to medical personnel who treated her.
“Plaintiff is unable to consistently articulate how she sustained an injury,” the defendants’ attorneys argued in their motion for summary judgment brief in September 2024.
Ortiz was treated by EMS at her house but waved off additional medical care three times on the day of her arrest, the officers alleged, until finally complaining of pain while at the jail that afternoon, when she agreed to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
The Town of Woodbridge and the defendant police officers contended that Ortiz stipulated to (or agreed to accept the validity of) probable cause for her arrest, the exigent circumstances for police entering the house, and the authorized search warrant in exchange for dismissal of all the charges against her in 2018.
Ortiz countered in a deposition and court documents that she had only stipulated to probable cause for the search warrant, not for her arrest, which she maintained was not justified by the circumstances, and that police had no good reason to believe she had committed a crime.
The parties had not yet engaged in a court-supervised settlement conference, which was postponed last year. They reached settlement terms out of court in January and notified the judge to terminate the case.
The $197,500 settlement between Ortiz and the Township of Woodbridge and its insurance carrier was first reported by Transparencynj.com, a New Jersey government watchdog website. The settlement agreement signed by Ortiz on Feb. 14 states that none of the defendants admit liability, that all expressly deny any wrongdoing, and releases them forever from all claims.
In March, attorneys for Ortiz notified U.S. District Court Judge Jessica Allen that case had been settled as to all defendants. In April, the parties filed documents with the court confirming that all of the plaintiffs’ claims against Woodbridge and all law enforcement defendants were voluntarily dismissed, without legal costs to any party.
