Audio: Lyft rider calls 911 after sheriff’s deputy tackles deaf driver

Joanne Joshua hid in the backseat of the Lyft she’d called and worried she was going to die.

A trip to Walmart in San Tan Valley had suddenly turned violent. A Pinal County Sheriff’s deputy had pulled over the car and, just moments earlier, had tackled the driver to the ground. The two men — one an armed law enforcement officer, the other a deaf 79-year-old man — now struggled outside on the other side of the car door from her. The 66-year-old Joshua hid out of sight, listening to them roll around on the gravel. She worried she would be next. 

She made a split-second decision that she didn’t even remember making until a private investigator told her about it a couple of months later: She dialed 911. She called the cops on the cops.

“I’m on Hunt Highway. Your officer is, is attacking this deaf driver, my Lyft driver! I hear a, I hear a siren. I hope someone’s coming to help because I’m in the back seat. I’m scared,” Joshua can be heard saying to the dispatcher in a recording of her 911 call, obtained by Phoenix New Times. “The guy’s deaf! He doesn’t understand!” 

The Lyft driver was Thomas Garro: a tiny, 5-foot-3 man who communicates in American Sign Language. New Times first reported his violent encounter with law enforcement in April. What had started for him as a short, routine fare had escalated after he was pulled over close to Joshua’s destination. Garro, who cannot lip-read, struggled to communicate with the deputy, Aaron McRae. The encounter ended with Garro on the ground and handcuffed so tightly his wrists bled. Police records revealed that Joshua called 911 on the deputy. 

“I just remember them saying, ‘Officers are on the scene,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, I understand that. That’s why I’m calling you, because I’m scared of the officers,’” Joshua told New Times in June.

Garro’s attorney, Jesse Showalter, said it’s obvious in the 911 call audio that Joshua is terrified and hiding in the back of the car for no other reason than being scared of the deputy. “She’s fearing for her own life,” he said. “That’s how out of control that Sheriff’s deputy was.” Joshua, who is Black, said that she thinks if Garro hadn’t been white, McRae might have killed them both.

“That’s how crazy it was,” she said.

Garro and his lawyer have not yet filed a notice of claim with Pinal County. The 180-day deadline for his case is in early July.

Pinal County Sheriff’s Office public information officer Sam Salzwedel declined to comment specifically on the incident because of the possible pending litigation but said that the department is aware of the 911 call and that McRae is not under investigation for the incident. Salzwedel said he was not immediately aware of other instances when citizens called 911 on deputies, nor did he have information about the agency’s training, policies and procedures for interacting with people who are deaf or hard of hearing. He confirmed that McRae had neither a body camera nor a dashboard camera because he is not in the units assigned camera through those programs.

Showalter said cases like Garro’s, in which footage of the incident is minimal or non-existent, are common in Pinal County because the deputies don’t wear body cameras. They are also riskier to fight in court in a civil case. It becomes the officer’s word against the plaintiff’s, and if the case goes before a jury, it might choose to trust the officer.

The 911 call is a game-changer — and a first for Showalter. He doesn’t think he’s ever had a case against law enforcement where someone called 911 on the officer during the incident.

“Here it’s clear that we have an independent witness with no skin in the game who is saying unequivocally: This is a problem caused by Pinal County Sheriff’s Office,” he said.

The traffic stop had started off tense, Joshua said. McRae seemed irritated from the moment he approached the door, and it got only worse as he and Garro struggled to communicate. 

“I don’t know if he was irritated because he was deaf and hard of hearing. I don’t know what it was,” she said of McRae. “He had attitude from the very beginning.”

Garro had made it clear from the start that he was deaf, she said, but that didn’t seem to matter. McRae kept talking to Garro — even cussing and yelling at him — despite Garro’s inability to hear him. Joshua watched the two men struggle to communicate as Garro handed over his license and registration. When McRae pointed out to Garro that his insurance card was expired, Joshua tried to intervene and explain that Garro couldn’t understand him. But the deputy shut her down. 

“Oh yes, he does understand me,” he snapped at her, she said. “And that’s when I said, ‘OK, let me shut my mouth.”

She also handed over her identification, and she and Garro waited in the car for at least 45 minutes as McRae ran their information. After a while, she wanted to leave. She was anxious to be done with the deputy and to get to Walmart. She wrote a message to Garro in her Notes app: “I’m scared to get out. I could walk to Walmart but he’s yelling.” Garro read it and got out of the car and opened her passenger door, she said. 

That’s when McRae exploded.

“The sheriff is yelling, ‘Get back in the car! Get back in the car!’” she said. “‘Get back in the effing car!’” Garro, of course, couldn’t hear him. He didn’t understand. “The sheriff was just yelling at him louder, like that was going to help,” Joshua said.

Then McRae slammed her door shut, grabbed Garro and pulled him to the ground. Joshua could no longer see them, but she could hear them. She called 911. She hoped the arrival of more deputies would defuse the situation.

McRae’s version of events is laid out in two different reports — the CAD distribution, which documents officer communications with dispatch, and the incident report. Both describe an encounter in which McRae is communicating with Garro, who responds and understands him, and even argues with him.

McRae’s brief report at the end of the CAD distribution reads: “Thomas Angelo Garro was able to read lips and was upset when I told him my reason for the traffic stop was he was speeding. Thomas then argued more about everyone speeding.” The incident report goes into more detail. 

McRae wrote that he pulled Garro over because he’d clocked him driving 60 miles per hour before accelerating to pass another car. Garro pointed at his ear, mouthing “I am deaf,” McRae wrote. McRae then asked Garro for his license while he looked at his face. Garro nodded in acknowledgment and handed over his license.

“Thomas then threw his hands up in the air and mouthed, why are you stopping me,” McRae wrote. He described Garro as getting more frustrated as he asked for his registration, grunting and throwing his hands in the air. 

“I then asked for his insurance and Thomas said what? I asked again and Thomas refused to look at me,” he wrote. Garro handed him an expired insurance card. “I held my finger next to the expiration and presented it to Thomas. Thomas just exhaled loudly and refused to grab his expired insurance,” he wrote. 

McRae writes that he went back to his patrol vehicle to run Garro’s info. While he was there, Garro got out of his car and waved his arms around. McRae ordered him back into the car, to which Garro responded by “throwing his hands in the air then pointing to his watch.” McRae wrote that he told Garro to get back in the car, this time (for some reason) louder. He added that Garro — who, again, is deaf — listened that time.

The rest of the report continues in a similar fashion. Eventually, he arrests Garro. 

Joshua, who said they interacted while he was getting their information earlier in the traffic stop, doesn’t appear in McRae’s report until after Garro gets out of the car to open her door. 

“I looked inside the rear of the vehicle a (sic) saw a female sitting. I did not know until this point another passenger was inside the vehicle,” he wrote. 

Garro said he can’t read lips — especially if someone has a mustache, like McRae. Even if he could, it would have been very difficult to do in that situation.

“He was angry, he was frustrated, he was screaming, and there was just so much going on,” Garro said. “I couldn’t read his lips even if I tried.”

McRae came over and apologized to her before she left, she said. It was like he was sorry she’d had to see that. She found it strange because he was the reason the traffic stop escalated. Before leaving, she asked him what was going to happen to Garro, who was handcuffed next to an ambulance. 

“‘He’s going to jail because he didn’t listen to me,’” she recalled McRae saying, adding, “He kept saying that he was going to jail.”

Garro did not go to jail. Instead, he was taken to the hospital and then released. According to the incident report, McRae tried to charge him with resisting arrest and failure to comply with a police officer, but the charges didn’t stick. Garro left the encounter with two tickets: one for speeding and one for driving with expired insurance. Both were ultimately dropped after he showed proof of valid insurance — he’d accidentally grabbed the wrong card from the glove box that day — and McRae didn’t show up to a hearing about the speeding. 

Months later, Garro is still struggling both mentally and physically from his encounter with McRae. He’s working with a therapist who knows sign language. He has started driving again, but only for short distances. He hasn’t driven for a rideshare app since. His daughter launched a GoFundMe to help with his bills, but it hasn’t come close to its $9,000 goal.

Joshua — who said she was never interviewed by law enforcement about the incident — said she feels bad that her note prompted Garro to get out of the car. “I really wanted to leave, but I — I was, I was scared to open the door myself,” she said. “I got the driver to, and you know, then that made it worse for him.” 

But Garro said it was a relief to find out about her 911 call. He wasn’t alone in thinking the deputy was being aggressive. That corroboration will help his case, should he choose to file one.

“It’s proof that someone else saw the injustice,” he said.