Sacramento County pays $1.2 million settlement to woman shoved and injured by deputy

Sacramento County has paid a $1.2 million settlement to an elderly woman who spent months in the hospital with a fractured femur after she was shoved on to the sidewalk by a sheriff’s deputy.

A video of the October 2024 incident showed a deputy shove Ourania Thimmhardy, 71 at the time, out the front door of the Sacramento County Main Jail, while discharging her, causing her to fall on the downtown sidewalk.

Sheriff Jim Cooper fired the deputy who shoved Thimmhardy, Matthew Gurich. The District Attorney’s Office filed felony assault charges, which are pending, with a court date set for July 24. His certification is temporarily suspended due to excessive or unreasonable force from the incident, according to the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.

The settlement agreement, which The Sacramento Bee obtained from a California Public Records Act request, was signed in May.

Thimmhardy was arrested Oct. 5, 2024, after she experienced a mental health crisis in a Starbucks, which she believed was a grocery store, and refused to leave, the lawsuit alleges.

Thimmhardy, who is diagnosed with schizophrenia, has spent involuntary time in mental health facilities, which authorities should have brought her to instead of jail, said Mark Merin, an attorney who filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Thimmhardy last year.

“She never should have been taken to the jail,” said Merin, a longtime civil rights attorney. “What you saw if you look at that case is a lack of compassion, a lack of empathy, an impatience and the result was a frail vulnerable woman got seriously injured.”

Merin said Cooper and the Board of Supervisors should also fire the three other deputies involved — Scott Walker, Katherine Zumwalt and Zachary Frizzell — who did not intervene. The suit also alleges the two security guards present, Jeffrey Soriano and Jason Pike, also did not intervene.

“You could say, ‘OK it’s just one person who did something wrong,’ but that’s not the case,” Merin said. “You had six people standing around watching, participating and endorsing the playbook. It’s the way they operate so it’s a top down problem.”

Sheriff’s spokesperson Sgt. Edward Igoe, along with Zumwalt, Frizzell, and Walker, did not immediately respond to emails for this story.

Senate Bill 1421 requires law enforcement agencies to publish records, video and audio files for the public regarding shootings or other uses of force that cause great bodily injury.

The Bee in February filed a Public Records Act for all materials that the bill requires to be released, including the Thimmhardy incident, from Jan. 1, 2024, to present. In response, the office did not release any materials that were not already on its transparency web page. For the Thimmhardy incident, that includes video and audio files, but no disciplinary records.

That means the public have no way of knowing whether the other three deputies were disciplined. All their certifications are active, according to a state web page.

As a result of the injury, Merin said, Thimmhardy will require care-workers the rest of her life.