VALLEJO – A former Vallejo police officer who was fired three years ago for endangering a colleague during the 2019 shooting of Willie McCoy sued the city and a former police captain last week, alleging that his personnel files were improperly retained and leaked.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court on Wednesday, alleges that former Vallejo police Officer Ryan McMahon was forced to leave the Broadmoor Police Department earlier this year after the Vallejo Sun reported that he was flagged for poor performance in connection with seven different incidents in 2018, including endangering another officer during a pursuit.
According to the lawsuit, the records used in the story were training memos that were supposed to be purged in 2018 and were improperly retained.
McMahon alleges that former Vallejo police Capt. John Whitney, who exposed the department’s tradition of bending the tips of their badges following a shooting, took confidential personnel records before he was fired. Whitney implicated McMahon as participating in the badge bending tradition in his own lawsuit filed in 2020, which he settled for $900,000 last week.
McMahon also alleged that Lt. Shane Bower did not properly secure his personnel records, which led to the records being leaked to the Sun.
McMahon joined the Vallejo Police Department in 2017 after stints in the Sausalito Police Department and the Central Marin Police Authority, according to state records.
Less than a year after he joined Vallejo police, he shot and killed Ronell Foster on Feb. 13, 2018. McMahon had attempted to stop Foster for riding his bike without a light and chased him into a backyard, where Foster allegedly got ahold of McMahon’s flashlight while on the ground.
The Foster shooting caused conflict in the department over whether McMahon followed policy, but he was ultimately cleared for the shooting. The city later settled a lawsuit with Foster's family for $5.7 million.
McMahon was the subject of a counseling memorandum regarding two May 2018 incidents in which he used “a lack of good judgment” for leaving his post as a traffic control unit to join in a separate police chase, according to the internal records provided to the Sun.
Without telling anyone, McMahon left his post to join in a vehicle pursuit on the other side of town, which caused the officer investigating the collision to “sprint to safety so as to avoid being hit” when a vehicle sped into the investigation scene.
McMahon was also admonished for interviewing suspects without first issuing their Miranda Rights – the rights read to arrested suspects named for the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona. He also failed to complete several investigations, including after he was ordered to follow-up on a domestic violence incident in which a victim reported that she had been sexually assaulted, and failed to collect physical evidence from several crimes, according to a performance improvement plan obtained by the Sun.
In February 2019, McMahon was one of six officers who fired 55 times into a silver Mercedes parked in a Taco Bell drive-thru where McCoy was found unresponsive, allegedly with a gun on his lap. McMahon arrived just as officers began shooting and fired one round from behind Officer Bryan Glick.
During that investigation, Vallejo police learned that McMahon added a plate to his gun with the words “Veritas” and “Aequitas," Latin for “truth” and “justice,” a reference to the 1999 film Boondock Saints, where two brothers engage in vigilante justice by killing men they believe to be evil.
McMahon’s lawsuit claims that he had added a cross to his gun “as a means of his religious belief in divine protection on the job” and said that it had been “used to accuse plaintiff of being in an extremist type of gang.”
As the department investigated the gun alterations, McMahon was ordered to turn in his badge. McMahon told department superiors those bends “signified the two people he had killed in the line of duty,” according to a lawsuit later filed on behalf of Whitney. Whitney later testified that he thought then-police Chief Andrew Bidou did not properly address the situation.
Whitney was later fired for erasing his department-issued phone as the department investigated whether he had leaked information about McMahon’s gun to the San Francisco Chronicle. The department did not sustain the allegation that Whitney had leaked the information.
Whitney went public with the badge bending allegations the following year. The city launched an investigation into the practice but has refused to release the results, saying it is a confidential personnel record.
McMahon was fired in October 2020 for endangering Glick’s life in the McCoy shooting, but in his lawsuit he claims that he “was cleared of any wrongdoing during the shooting.”
The lawsuit claims that McMahon received death threats after leaving the Vallejo Police Department, which caused him to relocate his family and find employment elsewhere. State records show that he started working for the Broadmoor Police Department in August 2022.
But the information in the Sun’s article caused others to “despise” McMahon and “fill with hatred and ridicule,” the lawsuit states. The same records were later provided to attorneys for the McCoy family, according to the lawsuit.
McMahon claims that the leaked records to the Sun caused him to lose his employment in Broadmoor. He is suing the city, Bower and Whitney for alleged violations of civil rights, invasion of privacy, and public disclosure of private facts.
McMahon’s attorney, Lenore Albert of Laguna Beach, did not return a request for comment.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that McMahon did not tell Whitney directly why his badge was bent.
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