A woman has been awarded $8.5 million following a horrific incident in a police car.
In September 2022, Yareni Rios-Gonzalez was handcuffed and detained by officers after being identified as a possible suspect in a road rage case.
According to CBS News, the police were informed that Rios-Gonzalez had threatened somebody with a gun.
After locating their suspect, the police pulled Rios-Gonzalez over, with everything being captured on video - which has been released by the Fort Lupton Police Department.
Sgt. Pablo Vasquez and Fort Lupton Police Officer Jordan Steinke had pulled their suspect over at a railroad crossing.
After detaining Rios-Gonzalez, the officers placed her in a Platteville Police Department patrol car, which was parked on the train tracks behind her vehicle.
The officers then returned to her truck to search for any additional occupants and potential weapons.
As Rios-Gonzalez sat in the patrol car, a train horn sounded, and the train collided with the vehicle, pushing it into a nearby field.
The video footage shows one of the officers calling for a medical response, stating: "The suspect was in the vehicle that was hit by the train."
Rios-Gonzalez was rushed to the hospital with multiple injuries, including several broken bones and a traumatic brain injury, her attorney Paul Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson also mentioned that she had been attempting to alert the officers before the collision.
“When she was in the back of the car, she was able to see the train coming. She was frantically trying to escape, trying to open the doors, but she was handcuffed,” he told CNN.
Defense attorneys for Steinke claimed that she was unaware Vasquez had parked the car on the tracks, according to The Guardian.
The $8.5 million settlement will be paid by the insurers for the town and city, and will be split equally between them, attorney Eric M. Ziporin informed CNN.
Wilkinson described the settlement as “an excellent result and a hard-fought result,” adding: “She is up and moving around. She is still recovering from some physical and emotional impacts that she'll be dealing with for the rest of her life. But considering she got hit by a train, she's doing all right.”
Following the incident, both officers faced multiple felony and misdemeanor charges. Vasquez, after pleading guilty to reckless endangerment in December, was sentenced to 12 months of unsupervised probation and was subsequently fired from his department, as reported by the Associated Press.
Steinke was convicted of the same charge, along with a misdemeanor for assault, and received 30 months of supervised probation and 100 hours of community service.
