Holiman

BACKGROUND

On the afternoon of June 19, 2017, rookie police officer Laura Bellamy was driving in her patrol car in downtown Vallejo, California. She had been a member of the police force for only one month and was on patrol accompanied by a field training officer for mandatory on-the-job training. It would be another three months before she would complete her training and be ready to go on patrol unaccompanied. She had not yet completed the traffic phase of her training. Officer Bellamy first saw Holiman’s car when her patrol car came to a stop at another intersection, not at issue here. At that first intersection, she saw Holiman’s car come to a stop at a stop sign on the cross-street to her right, and then make a left-hand turn in front of her patrol car and onto the street she was stopped on, in the opposite direction her patrol car was facing. Two years later at the suppression hearing, she testified that as Holiman made the left turn, she saw him “look[] at me and then quickly look[] away as if to want to hide his face” which she “found . . . curious,” and “so I turned around and followed him,” details not noted in her contemporaneous police report because she believed they…