On the morning of Nov. 17, 2024, Nyota Koya, a 66-year-old Black woman from Roseville, lost consciousness during an encounter with a Sacramento police officer named Matthew Sterling. She died a week later without ever regaining consciousness. Nearly two years later, the Sacramento Police Department still has not told her daughter and the public whether it disciplined the officer. Now Koya's daughter is left to seek damages through a lawsuit. Koya had been stranded in a parking lot at Haggin Oaks Golf Course near the eastern border of the city of Sacramento after her electric car's battery died, according to court documents. Responding to a report of trespassing, Sterling approached her just before 10 a.m. He offered to take her to a shelter and have her car towed. A second officer was with Sterling initially but left the scene for a time. More than two hours later, with her removal from the property still unresolved, Sterling forcibly pulled Koya from the car at 12:22 p.m., according to body camera footage provided to The Sacramento Bee by Koya's daughter's legal team. The second officer eventually returned to the scene. He is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Sterling then pushed her face down to the asphalt, placed his knee on her back, and handcuffed her, the footage shows. At 12:35 p.m., paramedics arrived and reported that she didn't have a pulse before taking her to Mercy San Juan Medical Center, where she died on Nov. 24, 2024. The lawsuit includes two body-camera screenshots showing Sterling, who like Koya is Black, smiling as he kneels over her. She is lying on her side on the asphalt, wearing a bathrobe, her gray hair in a bun, with her hands cuffed behind her back. When seen on the body-cam video, the smiling moment happens quickly. The exchanges Koya had with Sterling before she lost cons