The family of a 70-year-old woman who was killed in 2016 during a high-speed police chase in Savannah was awarded $3.5 million by a jury on Thursday.
According to court records from a lawsuit filed by the family of Bernitha Vaughn, the family matriarch was heading home after church and shopping at the grocery store when she was hit in a high-speed collision and killed.
The family sued due to the circumstances of the chase, where multiple law enforcement agencies were pursuing a suspected drug dealer at high speeds in undercover police vehicles.
Court records containing a summary of events from the day Vaughn died say City of Savannah police “saw what they believed to be a suspected drug transaction” at a McDonald’s and followed the vehicle involved out of the parking lot.
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An officer said, according to court documents, that he’d seen a driver, Kareem Felder, without his seat belt on and used it as probable cause to perform a traffic stop. When uniformed officers ran the plates, it showed as being a rental car. Then “marked units deactivated their emergency lights/equipment and stated that unmarked nits attempted a ‘vehicle follow’ but lost sight of the vehicle.”