A veterinarian who contends members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department fabricated a memo to cover up the 2020 death of a bomb-sniffing dog can move forward with her lawsuit for now, a judge ruled Tuesday.
Plaintiff Yolanda Cassidy maintains in her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that the communication at issue falsely stated that she examined the dog — a black Labrador named Spike — and could not determine what killed him.
On Tuesday, Judge Alison Mackenzie denied the county’s motion to dismiss Cassidy’s two causes of action: false light and invasion of privacy.
“Here, the court concludes that the (lawsuit) adequately alleges that plaintiff lost substantial past and future income in the minimum amount of $5 million,” as well as damage to her reputation in the veterinarian industry, the judge wrote.
The suit names the county, former Sheriff Alex Villanueva and two other individuals as defendants.
“Dr. Cassidy was highly successful in her job and in 2022 she was on the verge of launching her own veterinarian clinic,” the suit filed last July 6 states.
“She was well-respected and her reputation was stellar. Unfortunately, Ms. Cassidy’s privacy was violated and her reputation was destroyed by corrupt sheriff’s department officials.”
In their court papers, attorneys for the county maintained that Cassidy was not specific about her special damages claim, an argument rejected by the judge.
The county lawyers also maintained that Cassidy admitted that her career is going according to her plan, acknowledged that she was able to open her own business and does not contend that she lost any employment due to the words attributed to her in the memo.
The use of Cassidy’s name in the sheriff’s department memo was not a misappropriation of her name for commercial benefit, but was done so for transparency, the county attorneys additionally argued in their court papers.
According to the suit, after Spike died in the care of a sergeant under suspicious circumstances after overheating in a patrol car, Villanueva and a sheriff’s department chief “were so concerned about covering up the tortuous death of a police dog, they resorted to fraud to hide it, with no concern for harming innocent individuals to achieve their ends.”
The defendants “fabricated” that Cassidy saw Spike after he died and concluded that the dog may have died from causes, according to the suit, which further states that they were “fully aware that Ms. Cassidy never treated or saw Spike and therefore would not have offered and did not offer opinions of Spike’s death.”
During his successful 2022 campaign to unseat Villanueva, former Long Beach Police Department Chief Robert Luna stated that Villanueva was so corrupt that he even covered up Spike’s death, yet Luna has not conducted a criminal investigation into the animal’s passing, according to the suit.