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Dennis and Angela Ostini of Nice filed the case in U.S. District Court Feb. 16. It names the City of Burlingame, Police Chief Jack L. Van Etten, Officer Jarel Peters and Sgt. Jeff Downs.
The Ostinis are asking for $1.4 million in damages for an incident they say occurred in 2005, while they visited family in the city.
The couple themselves have law enforcement connections: Dennis Ostini is a Lake County Sheriff's sergeant. “He supervises Boat Patrol for us,” Sheriff Rod Mitchell said Friday.
The attorney for the Ostinis, who discussed the case with Bay Area news outlets over the last week, declined a request by this publication to interview her clients.
Angela Ostini told the San Francisco Chronicle last week that on July 10, 2005, she found out her brother, Samuel Giardina, had died unexpectedly. Her loud weeping caused neighbors to call the police to report a disturbance.
When they arrived, she told the Chronicle that Peters put his hand on her and kept telling her to calm down, and Ostini told him to remove his hand. Peters then reportedly shoved her into a chair. loudly berated her and threatened to have her taken for a mental evaluation.
Burlingame City Attorney Larry Anderson said Monday the city didn't have an official statement on the lawsuit.
“We tried to come to some resolution last year with Mrs. Ostini and weren't able to do so,” Anderson said.
Ananda Norris, Ostini's attorney, told Lake County News that Peters had lost a family member shortly before the confrontation with Ostini.
“The Burlingame Police Department was aware that Officer Peters was emotionally unstable and was unfit to carry out his duties as a police officer,” said Norris.
She added that Peters should have been able to have had a mourning period away from the “rigors of ordinary police work.”
“The Burlingame Police Department not only required him to be at work but asked him to go out on calls of distress involving potential acts of violence that were likely to trigger the debilitating emotions that would afflict any human being in a similar situation,” Norris said.
By doing so, said Norris, Burlingame Police put community members at risk.
Ostini and her brother were very close, Norris said. Giardina was nine years older than Ostini, and the last member of her immediate family. “They spoke daily and saw each other at least three days a week,” Norris said. “Angela and Sammy suffered the loss of both of their parents and helped each other to remember the good times they experienced as a family. Sammy was Angela's best friend and true confidant.”
Norris said Angela Ostini has been in a “state of arrested grief” since the July 2005 encounter. “She remains traumatized by Officer Peters' actions and the department's failure to resolve this matter fairly and swiftly has compounded her emotional distress,” Norris said.
Proceedings in the case aren't scheduled to begin until May, when a case management conference is on the calendar.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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Locally, 155 vehicles were stolen and 152 recovered, said Josh Dye, public affairs officer for the Clear Lake CHP Office. The following year, 186 stolen vehicles were stolen, and 160 recovered, Dye added.
That amounts to a 20-percent increase in local car thefts, relative to statewide statistics.
The CHP said there was a 5.5-percent decline in car thefts statewide between 2005 and 2006, which amounts to 14,399 fewer cars stolen.
In 2006 the majority of cars stolen were recovered, according to the CHP, which said 90 percent of the 247,896 cars stolen in 2006 were reunited with their owners.
CHP Commissioner Mike Brown said car theft is a “crime of opportunity.”
“A little bit of prevention can go a long way, but when a car is stolen, the tools we have now are helping to return the stolen cars to their rightful owners,” Brown said.
The CHP reported it's a part of 16 county-funded vehicle theft task forces across the state, which include various law enforcement agencies that use bait cars to combat auto theft.
Those bait cars are outfitted with a global-positioning system (GPS) and a video camera, which hep track the location, speed and direction of the vehicle being tracked, the CHP reported.
Officers are tipped off when a thief attempts to steal a car; as soon as officers are in position, the engine can be disabled with the click of a computer mouse and officers can arrest the suspect inside, according to the CHP. The video footage is then used as evidence in court to prosecute the suspect.
That bait car technique, the CHP said, has proved to be a successful deterrent – more than 95 percent of the time, if an activation occurs on a bait car, the thief will eventually steal the car and will also be arrested.
The CHP reported that in 2006, the department made 357 arrests from bait car deployments.
“Criminals are beginning to wonder what is, and what isn’t, a bait car,” said Brown.
In the effort to recover stolen cars, the CHP uses the automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system, which has helped the agency to seize or recover 868 wanted or stolen vehicles, worth more than $7 million. In the process, CHP also arrested 535 suspects through the period ending September 2006.
The system, mounted onto marked patrol cars, reads license plates of vehicles and compares them against the state's database of stolen and wanted vehicles, the CHP said. Currently, the CHP reports it has a 73-percent recovery rate using ALPR.
“It’s like an electronic hot sheet; it allows officers to obtain information instantly on a car’s license plate to see if it belongs to a stolen car,” said Brown.
Stanislaus County, an area particularly hard hit by vehicle theft in recent years, has noticed a difference since the implementation of the new auto-theft technology. That county saw a 40.6 percent decrease in the number of vehicles stolen from 2005 to 2006.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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