Felony charges, no trial: How a traffic stop upended her life for three years

Naya Abbey was trying to get a new job. With some better pay and stability, maybe she and her friend could get serious about the cleaning business they’d talked about. But two felony charges came up when the company ran her name — evading arrest and reckless endangerment.

There went her chance at getting that new job at Cigna. Then she lost the job she had as a temporary worker at Cigna due to the charges.

The charges stemmed from a traffic stop a few weeks before, when Abbey had been pulled over and ordered by officers with drawn weapons to exit the car she was driving, her 8-year-old autistic son silent in the backseat as she was placed in handcuffs and then taken to the Davidson County, Tennessee, jail for booking. The arresting officer justified the “felony takedown,” as it's called in the police report, because Abbey didn’t pull over when he said he flipped on his unmarked police car's emergency lights the first time after noticing the expired license plate on the car she was in.

Losing her job set off a chain of events that turned Abbey’s life upside down. She couldn’t find housing, suffered a miscarriage and without a home or resources, decided to send her son to live with her father. Eventually she left her adopted home of Nashville, Tennessee, to live with family in Detroit.

Three years later, the state dropped all the charges against Abbey.

Her record is clean, but her life has never been the same.

Now, she’s suing Metro Nashville and Metro Nashville Police Officer Terrance Stuckey, the arresting officer, in federal court over accusations of false arrest, malicious prosecution, and police perjury. Metro settled a similar lawsuit against MNPD and Stuckey earlier this year for more than $200,000."

“I'm just tired,” Abbey said in an interview with The Tennessean, part of the Paste BN Network. “I'm just ready to get back to normal, whatever that is.”

The defendants have not responded to the lawsuit as of publication. MNPD denied a request for comment for this story.

The traffic stop

On Aug. 14, 2019, Abbey and her son were moving out of her apartment in Nashville. She couldn’t afford her rent.

One of Abbey’s coworkers at her job agreed to let Abbey store some boxes in her shed, while Abbey would live with a friend. She was using a friend’s car to move the boxes.

Arriving to her coworker’s house at about 8 p.m. with the third load of boxes that day, she noticed a blue Chevy Impala pull up behind her. Abbey said that was Stuckey, the officer who later arrested her, but she didn’t know it yet.

She was slightly worried that the person in the car may have been trying to rob her after seeing some of the valuables she had in the car. She decided to drive away.

Stuckey followed her.

There are conflicting accounts — even between official records — of what happened next.

In police radio from that night obtained by Abbey from Nashville’s Emergency Communications Center and shared with The Tennessean, an officer, presumably Stuckey, asks for a helicopter to track Abbey near the intersection of D.B. Todd Jr. Boulevard and Buchanan Street because Abbey didn’t pull over when he tried to initiate a traffic stop.

The Tennessean also requested the radio recordings from Nashville ECC, which said it disposes of records after three years and no longer had the records in its custody.

Abbey does not remember police trying to pull her over at that intersection.

An investigation of the incident by Metro’s Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) obtained by The Tennessean says that MNPD’s system doesn’t show that Stuckey ever activated the car’s emergency equipment. Stuckey later testified at Abbey’s preliminary hearing that he briefly flipped on his siren, but he did not keep it activated, according to audio of the hearing that Abbey shared with The Tennessean.

If the emergency lights were activated, it's possible she didn’t notice the police lights, since her son was “having a fit” in the backseat, according to an April email from the assistant district attorney who handled the case, Kristen Stonehill.

Stuckey told the dispatcher over the radio that the driver — Abbey — “was not fleeing” and was “driving normal speeds.”

But minutes later, Stuckey said Abbey nearly hit a pedestrian. In his testimony for the OPA investigation, Stuckey said Abbey also ran a red light in an attempt to flee the stop. Abbey disputes both of those allegations.

Abbey said she first saw the unmarked police car’s lights come on near an intersection less than a mile from where Stuckey called for a helicopter. Abbey then stopped in the street’s middle lane. With the helicopter circling overhead, officers approached with their weapons drawn and told her to exit the car.

She complied and was handcuffed, according to the police report. Police let her call a friend to come pick up her son. Abbey was taken to the Davidson County Jail and charged with two felonies and misdemeanor driving with a suspended license. Abbey said her license was suspended due to an unpaid ticket from 2016 for not wearing a seatbelt. It was the first time she had been charged with anything more than a traffic violation. She was booked on a $10,000 bond, but she said she was let go after a few hours without posting bond.

Stuckey was also the subject of a wrongful arrest lawsuit against MNPD in which officers arrested a man driving a red Lexus despite seeking a suspect in a black Nissan and, like Abbey's case, charged him with felony evading arrest. Also like Abbey's case, there are conflicting reports over whether police turned on their overhead lights. Metro settled the lawsuit in January and paid the plaintiff Ralph Ward $236,000, one of the largest wrongful arrest settlements the city has made.

The fallout

After her arrest, Abbey went back to work at her new job as a provider care representative for Cigna through Kelly Services, a staffing company. She was a temporary worker, and she was hoping to be hired to a permanent position at Cigna.

But her application to Cigna was denied because she failed the background check, Abbey said. In December 2019, she suffered a miscarriage, Abbey’s medical records shared with The Tennessean show, which she attributes to the stress of her encounter with police and unstable living situation.

She then lost her temporary job with Cigna because of the charge. She applied to other jobs, but none hired her, so she did odd jobs to try to make ends meet, but it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t stay with her friend anymore, and was told she couldn’t rent an apartment she applied for because of the open felony charges, Abbey said. She was couch surfing — always searching for a place to stay, often unsure where she would go at the end of the day.

Her brother Evan Wilson said Abbey became paranoid about encountering the police again and was "living in fear."

In early 2020, she made the hard decision of sending her son to live with his father in Alabama.

“If I have to be in the shelter or sleep on the streets, I didn’t want him doing that,” she said.

Meanwhile, her case kept getting delayed, at no fault of either the state or Abbey, according to the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office. Wilson said she was offered a plea deal but never took it because she believed she was innocent.

"She was going to be on probation for a whole year, but she was still going to have that felony because of it," Wilson said. He remembers telling her, "that's no deal for you."

In September 2022, more than three years later, she wrote to Judge Jennifer Smith, asking that her case be dismissed, writing that she hadn't been in any trouble since the arrest.

“Since this case has been on my name I have been unemployed because employers didn’t know if I was going to jail or if I would be free from these charges,” Abbey wrote. “With this still sitting on me, it’s just a reminder of all the pain I went through trying to stay afloat with my son who has special needs. Trying to feed him through a pandemic with no income almost took my faith right out of me.”

The case was dismissed the same day. She moved to Michigan to be near family who could support her shortly after.

Stonehill, the assistant district attorney who handled the case, said in an email that "it was a good (traffic) stop with fine proof," but the decision was reached because Abbey hadn’t been arrested since the stop and her case likely wouldn’t be heard for several more months at the earliest.

On paper, it’s like the arrest never happened. But Abbey thinks about where she’d be if things had gone differently, like if those were misdemeanor charges rather than felonies. She probably wouldn’t have lost her job. Maybe she’d have opened the cleaning business she and a friend had considered starting. They’d already picked out a name: “Just Clean Cleaning Services.”

“I guess I’d be a business owner,” she said.

But most importantly, she'd still have her son.

"I just keep thinking about getting back to my son because that's what matters most," Abbey said.

Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanMealins.