Civil rights lawsuit against Daytona Beach Police after a traffic stop ended up in a ditch, arrest
By: A Volusia County man has filed a lawsuit against the Daytona Beach Police Department.
Kary Jarvis says two officers violated his civil rights when they pulled him over for a traffic stop. An officer’s body camera captured the whole incident.
The two officers had minor injuries and Jarvis was arrested on multiple felony charges after the stop.
But video of the incident led to a judge’s written reprimand, saying the injuries resulted from the officer’s illegal activity.
The video shows the moment the two officers approached Jarvis’s vehicle.
“Got your license and registration on you,” Officer Marville Tucker asks in the video.
“Yes sir,” Jarvis responded.
After about 8 minutes, Tucker returns and tells Jarvis he will be given a warning and asks him to search the vehicle.
“You got anything in here I need to worry about,” Tucker asks in the video.
“No, sir,” Jarvis said.
Tucker asks two more times if he can search the vehicle.
“No, sir,” Jarvis said. “For what? I didn’t do nothing wrong. I’m innocent.”
Over the next three minutes, officers ask Jarvis to get out of the car.
Then Officer James Mackenzie takes over.
“We don’t know if you’re hiding weapons guns, grenades, anything, man.” Mackenzie can be heard saying on the video.
Jarvis gets out of the vehicle and Mackenzie comes to the driver’s side.
Jarvis asks to speak to someone else twice. He never consents to a search. Jarvis told officers in the video if they were going to search, he wanted to watch.
When officers say he cannot watch, Jarvis can be seen in the video getting back in the car and officers try to pull him out.
Jarvis punches the gas, and the SUV takes off down the street. Mackenzie falls to the ground. Tucker jumps into the vehicle, holding on to the steering wheel and to Jarvis.
Then Jarvis crashes into a ditch, the video shows.
In an interview, News 6 asked Jarvis why he hit the gas.
“I didn’t want to get yanked out of my truck,” Jarvis said. “I didn’t know what they were doing. One grabbed me by my neck, the other grabbed me by my leg.”
“I ain't gonna let somebody sit there and beat on me,” he added.
Jarvis was arrested that day on three felony charges. Two counts of aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer and aggravated fleeing, according to the charging affidavit.
He was held without bond and spent 369 days behind bars, according to court records.
“That one little blink of the eye, I lost everything,” Jarvis said. “I lost my house. I lost my vehicle. I lost everything.”
When Judge Sandra Upchurch saw the video, she wrote, “the videos are the best evidence of what occurred that day.”
“Mr. Jarvis was unlawfully detained after his first denial of consent,” Upchurch wrote in her ruling. “Had officers allowed Mr. Jarvis to leave, as he was entitled to, no one would have gotten hurt. The injuries resulted from the officers’ own Illegal activity.”
The state later dropped the charges, but Jarvis had already spent more than a year behind bars.
“It just disturbs me because if they do it to me, they’ll do it to someone else,” Jarvis said.
The Dayton Beach Police Department’s internal investigation found Mackenzie violated three “departmental standards directives” and was given a written reprimand, according to police records.
“Officer Tucker was terminated for another incident not involving Kary Jarvis,” a department spokesperson confirmed to News 6 via email.
“We want to establish this is a pattern that the City of Daytona Beach is allowing to happen,” Jarvis’s attorney Arthur Huggins said.
Jarvis is suing the department, both officers individually, and in their official capacity.
News 6 gave the department a chance to respond, but they declined due to pending litigation.