Shortly after learning that a Seattle police officer had run over and killed a woman at a crosswalk, Daniel Auderer, a Seattle cop and the vice-president of the police guild, called the union’s president and downplayed the accident. “There is initially—he said she was in a crosswalk, there is a witness that said, ‘No she wasn’t,’ but that could be different,” Auderer says, “because I don’t think she was thrown 40 feet, either. ”
On Auderer’s body camera audio they can be heard joking about the woman’s death and laughing at the crash. “She is dead,” Auderer says. Then he laughs. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah, yeah, just write a check, just, yeah.” Auderer laughs again. “$11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.”
The police cruiser was traveling at 75 MPH in a 25 MPH zone when it hit and killed Jaahnavi Kandula, who was only 23 when she was killed. Kandula, who was in the middle of the crosswalk and had the right-of-way when she was fatally struck, was a Master’s student at Northeastern University and financially supporting her mother back in India. The police car did not have its siren on at the time it ran her down.
As for the cop who laughed at her death and called her a person of “limited value,” Daniel Auderer has been the subject of eighteen Office of Police Accountability investigations since 2014 costing the city more than $2,000,000 in lawsuits.
-- Jeffrey St. Clair, "Roaming Charges: Just Write a Check" (COUNTERPUNCH).
