Nyota Koya was 66, wearing a bathrobe, and her electric car had run out of battery. On Nov. 17, 2024, a Sacramento police officer put her face down on the asphalt of a golf course parking lot and knelt on her back while she was in handcuffs. She never woke up. Two years later, the department will not tell her daughter whether he was ever disciplined.
Ms. Koya, a Black woman from Roseville, died a week later at Mercy San Juan Medical Center. Her estate and her daughter, Nathifa Wright, sued in federal court in Sacramento in September 2025. The suit names Officer Matthew Sterling, the city, the police department and former Police Chief Katherine Lester, and lists 17 claims, among them excessive force, false detention and wrongful death.
What the footage shows
Police were first called about the car at Haggin Oaks Golf Course on Nov. 15, and security staff called again two days later. Sterling, hired in 2022, answered a trespassing report shortly before 10 a.m. Body camera footage, as the Sacramento Bee reported, shows the exchange souring over a tow truck she did not want.
“I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do now because I got to a point I don’t care anymore,” Sterling told her, according to the footage. “I gave you options, you declined the tow truck.” He also said: “I’m done playing your game. I played your game for an hour and a half.”
Around 12:22 p.m. he pulled her from the car. Screenshots from the body camera, filed with the lawsuit, show him smiling as he kneels over her. Paramedics arrived at 12:35 p.m. and found no pulse. The footage records Ms. Koya saying, “Can you help me can you, please please.”
The city’s answer
The Sacramento County coroner listed the cause of death as complications of a pulmonary thromboembolism due to deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot, and classified the manner as natural. Deputy City Attorney Andrea Velasquez has said whether police caused her death remains “very much in dispute.” That is the city’s position, and a court will test it. A clot does not make a knee on the back of a handcuffed 66-year-old harmless, and the lawsuit says exactly that.
Sterling remains employed. City spokesperson Jennifer Singer confirmed that and declined to say more, citing “pending litigation or confidential personnel matters.” Ms. Wright, 37, has heard nothing from the department. “Who investigated this and what did they conclude? Show me that. I never heard anything,” she said. “She deserved respect. Not to be treated like a dog on the street. Or worse.”
The silence is built into the law. California’s SB 1421 opens police records mainly in shootings, not in deaths after restraint. Assemblymember Nick Schultz, a Democrat from Burbank, is considering a bill to extend transparency to non-shooting police deaths.
Black families have long learned how their relatives died from lawsuits, not from the departments that held them. A woman needed help with a dead battery and was met with a knee. Sacramento owes her family the result of its in-custody death investigation, and the public the officer’s disciplinary record. If it has nothing to hide, it should publish both. The case is before U.S. Magistrate Judge Chi Soo Kim, and no trial date has been reported.
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