Daniel Auderer
Seattle police officer who was heard joking and making insensitive comments about 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula’s death in January of 2023
On Jan. 23, Auderer was dispatched to assist with a collision after another officer, on his way to an emergency, struck and killed Kandula while she was in a crosswalk in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.
In the body camera footage, Auderer, who was not involved in the January collision, was captured in the video saying, “but she is dead” and laughing while on the phone.
“She was 26 anyway,” Auderer said in the video. “She had limited value.”
An employee with the Seattle Police Department alerted OPA to the video.
After the bodycam video was brought to light, Auderer wrote a letter to OPA where he explained he was not making fun of the death but instead mocking the callousness of the legal system.
“Even crediting your explanation as true, that does not excuse the callousness of your comments,” commanders wrote to Auderer in a memo The Seattle Times obtained from the Police Department. “Nor does it explain your full-bellied laughter” while discussing Kandula’s death in a South Lake Union crosswalk only hours earlier, the night of Jan. 23, 2023.
The leaders recommended Diaz punish Auderer with a minimum of 30 days off without pay — the most severe SPD discipline short of termination — or fire him.
Diaz is scheduled to hold a disciplinary hearing, where Auderer will be given a last chance to explain himself, on March 4.
“The person whose death caused you such apparent glee is mourned by many who knew her, loved her and were rooting for her to make good here,” the commanders wrote of Kandula, who grew up in India and was a graduate student at Northeastern University’s Seattle campus.
They continued: “The disgrace you have brought to the department on a global scale will undoubtedly stain SPD’s reputation for years, and your insensitivity tarnished some observers’ perceptions of all SPD officers” and put them at risk.
Auderer, an SPD traffic officer, had responded from home last January to the East Precinct to determine whether Kevin Dave, the officer who struck Kandula, was impaired, ultimately concluding he was not. Afterward, unaware his body camera was still recording, Auderer called Seattle Police Officers Guild President Mike Solan.
Auderer, the union’s vice president, laughed after stating Kandula was dead, incorrectly said she was “just 26,” and reasoned her young life had “limited value” and that the city should “just write a check.” Solan’s end of the two-minute conversation isn’t heard in the footage.
Solan and Auderer have said their call was private, mostly union-related and never intended to be made public. The conversation went undiscovered until an SPD public-disclosure employee flagged it in September for agency attorney Rebecca Boatright, who referred it to OPA for investigation.