A woman is suing several sheriff’s deputies, accusing them of beating her while she was hospitalized, handcuffed and waiting for a CT scan at an emergency room in California.

According to Malia Ashad’s federal lawsuit filed Feb. 1, she was already injured when deputies repeatedly punched her in the head, grabbed her throat and left a boot imprint on her back at the Kaiser Permanente San Leandro Medical Center on Aug. 9, 2022. 

Ashad, a mother of two children, was first attacked that day at a civil hearing in Alameda County Superior Court on Aug. 9, 2022, according to the lawsuit.

Her accused attacker, a woman she had a restraining order against, repeatedly hit Ashad in the head and face with a cellphone, resulting in Ashad grabbing the woman’s hair “to stop the assault,” a complaint says. 

In a video shared by Ashad’s attorneys, body camera footage shows a woman continuously slamming her fist into Ashad’s head as she sat in the courtroom.

Ashad felt relieved when she thought deputies in the courtroom were coming over to rescue her — but then she was attacked by them, said Angel Alexander, one of the attorneys representing her, at a Feb. 1 news conference.

“That relief quickly turned into confusion and panic when (Ashad) was treated as an actual assailant and not the victim,” Alexander said.

An Alameda County Sheriff’s Office deputy is accused of forcefully apprehending Ashad, handcuffing her and taking her to a room, where she was “forced” toward a chair in the corner of that room, according to the complaint.

She “lost her balance, hit her head on a nearby table, and fell to the floor” before she “cried out in pain as she lay bleeding from her head and then began to seize before losing consciousness,” the complaint says. 

Deputies then told Ashad she was under arrest for assault, and she was taken to Kaiser Permanente’s emergency room in an ambulance, according to the complaint.

There, the deputies are accused of attacking her further.

With her lawsuit, Ashad accuses the deputies of violating her civil rights and is seeking an unspecified amount of damages.