LOUISVILLE (LN) — Logan has owned the car since May 2020. According to her amended complaint, Bryan followed her to a shop on June 15, 2020, observed the vehicle, and returned the next day — executing a criminal warrant unrelated to Logan at a residence where she had parked — then ordered it towed and stored as evidence under the Nelson County Sheriff's Department's control.
When Logan sought the car back, she was told it had been sold. When she asked again, she was told she would need to pay $17,000 to secure its return. A certified letter repeating that demand arrived in 2024. By early 2025, Logan alleged, she learned the defendants had been driving the car and had transferred the title into their own names.
On March 5, 2026, both officers were indicted on charges including abuse of public trust, theft by deception, and official misconduct. The criminal case against Pineiroa was later dismissed in its entirety; Bryan resolved his case by plea agreement. Charges related to Logan's vehicle were dismissed in both proceedings.
The court held that Logan had adequately pleaded a Monell claim under what her complaint calls the "Take and Keep Policy" — a practice by which Nelson County deputies allegedly performed unauthorized intentional acts, including theft by deception, forgery, and official misconduct, to seize and retain individuals' personal property. The opinion noted Logan alleged Pineiroa not only participated in that policy but directed his employees, including Bryan, to do the same and made a deliberate choice to ignore the criminal acts and not to investigate and punish any individual. That was enough, the court held, to support both a ratification theory and a tolerance-and-acquiescence theory stage.
The individual-capacity Section 1983 claims for continuing trespass and wrongful taking also survived. Defendants argued those counts rested on state-law violations rather than federal constitutional ones, but the court rejected that framing, noting the defendants themselves had acknowledged the complaint alleged deprivations of Logan's Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The court added that defendants had failed to brief the elements of either constitutional claim and declined to construct their argument for them.
The sole claim dismissed was Logan's Section 1983 failure-to-train count. The court held she had not connected the alleged pattern of unconstitutional conduct to any deficiency in the department's training program — alleging instead that the municipality should have used training to remedy misconduct it already knew about, which the Sixth Circuit treats as a distinct and more demanding showing. Logan also appeared to abandon the individual-capacity version of that claim by failing to address it in her response brief.
Logan's Kentucky common-law conversion and trespass-to-chattels claims likewise survived, with the court declining to resolve the defendants' statute-of-limitations defense stage and rejecting their argument that Logan had failed to allege the intent required for an intentional trespass to chattels.
Bryan entered his guilty plea proceeding while charges tied directly to Logan's vehicle were dropped — leaving the question of what, if anything, happened to the Altima to be resolved in civil discovery.