- By Brandon Drenon
- BBC News, Washington DC
An investigation is underway into a body camera video that appears to show a Seattle police officer laughing about a woman who was fatally struck by a patrol car.
Officer Daniel Auderer was responding to an incident where Jaahnavi Kandula, 23, was killed near her university.
In the video, the officer can be heard saying that the Indian student's life had “limited value” and that the city should “just write a check.”
The officer said his comments were taken out of context.
Ms. Kandula, a graduate student at Northeastern University's Seattle campus, was struck and killed by a police car while crossing the street on January 23.
According to the Seattle Times, citing a police investigation report, the officer driving the car was doing 74 mph (119km/h) and the graduate student's body was thrown more than 100ft (30m).
Officer Auderer was called to the incident where his body camera recorded audio of a call he made to a colleague.
“But she's dead,” the officer can be heard saying before laughing. “No, he's a normal person. Yeah, just write a check,” she says, before laughing again.
“Eleven thousand dollars. It was 26, anyway. It was of limited value.”
Mr. Auderer, union chief of the Seattle Police Department, has been in contact with Mike Solan, the union president. Mr. Solan's audio is not heard.
The Seattle Police Department released a statement Monday saying it discovered the conversation from an employee who overheard it “in the normal course of business.”
That employee was “concerned about the nature of the statements” and escalated his concerns up the chain of command, according to the police statement.
Officials then turned the matter over to the Police Accountability Office, the agency that investigates police misconduct.
The agency is looking into “the context in which” the statements were made and whether any policies were violated, the Seattle Police Department said.
“I laughed at the ridiculousness of the way these cases are being tried,” Mr. Auderer wrote, according to KTTH radio.
The Seattle Community Policing Commission, another watchdog agency, described the dashcam footage as “heartbreaking and shockingly insensitive.”
Victoria Beach, the president of the African American Community Advisory Council, told local news that she was “shocked, very emotional” and “sick about it.”
“It really bothered me that someone could laugh at someone who died,” he said.
The King County Prosecutor's Office is conducting a criminal investigation into the crash.