Oakland police allegedly “abandoned” the “bleeding and disoriented” survivor of a high-speed collision last year, providing her no medical assistance as her boyfriend lay dead on the sidewalk, according to a legal claim filed by an attorney representing the woman and the deceased man’s estate.
Ta Ta Neshe “Nina” Woodruff and Marvin Boomer were taking an evening stroll on May 28, 2025, near their home in East Oakland, when Eric Hernandez Garcia lost control of his car, spun out of control, and crashed into a fire hydrant. The hydrant was sheared from its base and flung into Boomer, killing him instantly. His last act was to try to protect Woodruff. She was thrown to the ground and sustained a fractured arm and other serious injuries.
Michelle Bernard, an attorney assisting Woodruff and Boomer’s estate, has accused the city of Oakland in a 33-page legal filing of negligence because of how OPD officers responded to the scene of the crash, and for road conditions. The California Highway Patrol, according to Bernard, also failed to consider the riskiness of chasing Hernandez Garcia and should have called off the pursuit.
“The City of Oakland and the California Highway Patrol created the danger,” Bernard wrote in the legal claim, which was submitted to Oakland in November. “The City of Oakland and the California Highway Patrol are responsible for the consequences.”
The Oakland Police Department, the city attorney’s office, and CHP all declined to comment on the claim.
But CHP has previously said they had stopped chasing Hernandez Garcia well before the collision. Video recorded by a CHP airplane appears to confirm that its troopers stopped chasing Hernandez-Garcia at high speed in advance of the collision but continued to follow behind him.
Bernard told us today that Oakland has not responded to the legal claim. The attorney said she is still drafting the lawsuits against the CHP and the OPD, and they should be ready to file next week. (Under state law, people alleging they were injured, or that a loved one was killed by government negligence, must first file a claim before filing a lawsuit.)
In the legal claim, Bernard estimated the damages Woodruff allegedly suffered from the Oakland police to be between $10 and $18 million, including traumatic brain injury, broken bones, and PTSD. A similar estimate for CHP is not contained in the copy of the legal claim we obtained from the city.
The attorney for Hernandez Garcia, Martin Caraves, is currently seeking his release from Santa Rita Jail, where he’s being held pretrial. Caraves says his client is suffering from mental health issues. The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office opposes his release on the grounds that it would be unsafe to the community.
“An ordinary spring evening” turned into a nightmare
Woodruff and the Boomer family’s legal claim presents, from their perspectives, the most complete narrative so far of what happened the night of the crash.
“A quiet East Oakland neighborhood, the kind where porch lights glow like candles in a row, was settling into an ordinary spring evening on May 28, 2025,” Bernard wrote. “Children had come inside. Dinner plates were being cleared. A light breeze carried the smell of jasmine and wet earth from the lawns.
What happened next, Bernard wrote, was “so violent, so disorienting, that nearly every witness…described it in terms reserved for disasters, not residential streets.”
Hernandez Garcia was reportedly driving “close to 100 miles per hour,” according to Bernard, and was “fishtailing” and “out of control.”
When he approached an orange construction cone at the intersection of 12th Avenue and East 21st Street, the 18-year-old hit the cone and swerved, veering toward Boomer and Woodruff.
The cone had been placed by a resident on top of a deep, structurally unstable depression in the road that, according to Bernard, the city had failed for years to fix, minimizing the problem by calling it a pothole.
Woodruff and the Boomer family’s legal claim alleges that neighbors had emailed the city, filed service tickets through OAK311, and called public works trying to get the sinkhole fixed, but nothing had been done.
The moment Hernandez Garcia hit the sinkhole, “physics took control,” Bernard writes.
“Impact. Violence. Silence. Then screaming. The sound of metal hitting human bone echoed across the street. Pieces of the fire hydrant sheared off and exploded upward as a geyser of water blasted into the air,” Bernard wrote.
Boomer was thrown so violently into the steel railing by the hydrant, according to the legal claim, that the impact bent the railing. Photos of the crash scene support this description. He immediately collapsed into the grass. A later review found that Boomer died instantly.
Police officers ‘were standing there, talking’
Woodruff alleges that OPD officers who showed up in the immediate aftermath of the crash did not check her vital signs, provide first aid, escort her to safety, or call an ambulance.
According to Woodruff and her attorney, she was instead treated as a possible suspect in the collision.
“Witnesses heard officers suggest she might have been in the Infiniti that caused the crash. This led Nina — concussed, terrified, bleeding, and in shock — to wander away from the scene instead of receiving medical care,“ Bernard wrote. Neighborhood residents, Woodruff said, were the ones who took her to the hospital.
Bernard described the way the police allegedly treated Woodruff as “deliberate indifference,” and that she was made to suffer from a “stigmatizing accusation of criminality.”The legal claim also outlines allegations against the CHP.
Bernard claims that the CHP officers who had been pursuing Hernandez Garcia did so at unsafe speeds, re-engaged a “frightened, unstable driver,” missed two opportunities to safely detain him, including when he briefly stopped near Park Boulevard, and failed to perform the necessary risk assessment of continuing the pursuit in the middle of a residential street.
“Marvin and Nina would be alive and uninjured” if they had followed their own pursuit policies around those issues, she wrote.
While Bernard faulted the city for the road conditions that she alleges contributed to the crash, she wrote that CHP also bears blame. The CHP officers “funneled a fleeing vehicle into that block at dangerous speeds, the sinkhole converted a dangerous situation into a deadly one.”
Bernard also said that the CHP should have stopped Hernandez Garcia when they had the chance, including when he parked and very briefly got out of his car, before fleeing again.
Hernandez Garcia’s attorney said in court documents filed last year that the teen stopped to see his high school teacher, whom he had communicated with during the pursuit. The teacher had asked him to visit to calm him down.
CHP videos released two weeks after the incident show Hernandez Garcia stopping and exiting his vehicle on 5th Avenue, less than a mile away from the crash site. CHP officers who were following him quickly arrived and exited their vehicles in an attempt to detain Hernandez Garcia, but he got back into his car and continued fleeing, striking a minivan as he turned onto E. 21st.
Once at the scene of the crash, Bernard says officers from both agencies failed to secure the area.
The complaint accuses OPD and CHP officers of failing to extinguish the fire in Hernandez Garcia’s crashed car, or to establish a safety perimeter and block traffic while a geyser of water from the sheared-off hydrant shot into the air in the middle of a busy residential street.
“Not one retrieved a fire extinguisher,” the legal claim reads. “Not one stepped forward to control the flames. No one took command.”
Instead, she said that residents put out the fire themselves with hoses from their homes, Bernard wrote. The CHP videos reviewed by The Oaklandside, however, do show a CHP officer using a fire extinguisher on the still-burning car. Three other extinguishers, from unknown owners, are seen on the ground.
Bernard also wrote that since East 21st Street is a narrow residential street with family homes and children’s bicycles, it should have been a “pursuit-prohibited” environment.
According to Bernard, two or three residents, including a medical doctor, Brian Yokers, ran to the scene, found Boomer motionless, and moved him away from the burning vehicle.
Videos and photos attached to the legal claim shed further light on the crash.
One video, recorded by a camera at the home where the crash occurred, shows that while the fire hydrant hit Boomer flush in his upper body, it may have also hit Woodruff. It also shows that Hernandez Garcia’s car appears to come within inches of hitting the couple as he crashed into a tree and a parked car. Witnesses had previously reported that Hernandez Garcia’s car had headed directly toward the tree without coming close to the couple.
The videos show that in the aftermath of the collision, Boomer was left covered with a yellow tarp. The owner of the house where the collision occurred, Pastor James Polk, told The Oaklandside at the time that Boomer’s body was left there for hours, so he kept him company, praying over him.
