An eastern Oregon woman has filed a $300,000 lawsuit claiming that two police officers used a body-worn camera to surreptitiously record her as she urinated — in what her lawsuit says amounts to an egregious breach of state law.
Tami Nuxall’s suit says she was complying with police orders to provide a urine sample in response to fabricated charges that she had been driving under the influence of intoxicants when an Oregon State Police trooper or a city of Enterprise police officer placed a body-worn camera on the counter and recorded her in what was supposed to be a private moment.
Approximately six weeks later, the Wallowa County District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges without explanation, according to court records. And after months of records requests and enlisting the help of a civil attorney to learn why, Nuxall finally received a piece of evidence she hadn’t known existed: the recording of her urinating, said her civil attorney, Wes Williams.
Williams said that with his client’s permission, he and Nuxall watched the video together.
“It’s just incredibly dehumanizing,” Williams told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Oregon law states that a person “asked to give a urine sample shall be given privacy and may not be observed by a police officer when producing the sample.”
Nuxall is suing the city of Enterprise and its entire three-member police force: Officer Shannon Stillman, Officer Jacob Curtis and Chief Kevin McQuead. Nuxall also has filed suit against Oregon State Police Trooper Brian Miller, whose camera, the lawsuit says, recorded her “bare buttocks and pubic area” as she produced the urine sample in February 2025.
The city of Enterprise and its attorneys, as well as its three officers, didn’t respond to requests for comment this week or last. A spokesperson for Oregon State Police declined to comment on behalf of Miller, citing the pending litigation.
None of the officers has been the subject of a complaint or an investigation by the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training, which disciplines officers found to have committed misconduct.
An acrimonious relationship
Though the suit doesn’t reference it, Nuxall and police in the 2,100-resident town of Enterprise — about 300 miles east of Portland — have had a contentious relationship.
Nuxall, a 42-year-old single mother of two and a fifth-generation resident of the region, lives less than half a mile from the police station.
But Nuxall doesn’t appear to have run afoul of Enterprise police until 2023, when she was ticketed for failing to carry proof of insurance, failing to obey a traffic control device and displaying expired registration tags.
It was at that stop that Nuxall said Curtis, an Enterprise police officer, pulled a gun on her and her children after stopping the truck they were riding in and a man ran from it.
Nuxall complained, but her complaints didn’t get far after the police chief said Curtis was responding to a perceived threat and his gun was only out for a short time, according to the local news organization, The Wallowa County Chieftain.
Nonetheless, Nuxall started lobbying the city to form an independent board that would review allegations of police misconduct. At a fall 2023 city council meeting, she told city council members that police were “out of control” and that she worried about their extreme powers, as well as their ability to retaliate when miffed, according to the city’s meeting minutes.
Although Nuxall had been convicted about a decade earlier — in 2013 — of driving while intoxicated and injuring another person while living for a spell in Alaska, her Oregon criminal record had remained clean.
But in the 15 months after the Enterprise officer pulled a gun on her and she began complaining about police, she was stopped and ticketed by regional police more than any other time in her life, according to court records. In all, Enterprise police, Oregon State Police or the Wallowa County Sheriff’s Office stopped Nuxall six times in late 2023 and 2024 for alleged code or traffic violations. Half of those cases were dismissed, though a charge stemming from a seventh stop accusing Nuxall of DUII in 2024 is still headed to trial.
Then came Feb. 1, 2025. It marked the eighth time Nuxall had a run-in with police during that 15-month period. It also became the subject of her lawsuit.
According to her lawsuit, Nuxall had called Enterprise police that day to report that a man had her dog and wouldn’t give it back.
By the time police showed up, however, the man had returned her dog. But officers Stillman and Curtis wouldn’t let her go on her way, she said.
Instead, the officers said they smelled alcohol on her breath and found three methamphetamine pipes and a jar of meth on her or in her car, according to the lawsuit.
An arrest, then a dismissal
Nuxall’s suit contends that the evidence was all made up — and the case fell apart because police had nothing on her.
According to the suit, police ordered Nuxall to blow into an Intoxilyzer 8000. But twice, they said, the results came back with an error code.
Police then drove Nuxall to Wallowa Memorial Hospital, where the lawsuit says a phlebotomist complied with a search warrant by withdrawing blood from Nuxall. Next, Stillman and a nurse — both female — remained in the room while Nuxall produced a urine sample.
Williams, Nuxall’s attorney, said there was no curtain or door obstructing their view and that Nuxall remained in full sight of Stillman and the nurse as she complied by urinating into a bedpan. The suit says Stillman or Oregon State Police Trooper Brian Miller had placed Miller’s body-worn camera on a counter, unbeknownst to Nuxall.
The video captured Nuxall pulling down her pants, urinating and then pulling up her pants, the suit says.
Nuxall spent the night in jail, then was released in the morning with a court date.
By March 19, 2025, however, the Wallowa County District Attorney’s Office dropped both the charges — DUII and meth possession — stating only in court records that it was “in the interest and furtherance of justice.”
District Attorney Rebecca Frolander told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email Thursday that she couldn’t say for sure why both cases were dropped because the prosecutor who handled the case, Deputy District Attorney Veronica Warnock, is on vacation until mid-August. But Frolander said she believed the DUII charge was dismissed because no witnesses saw Nuxall driving while intoxicated.
When asked if she was aware that police recorded Nuxall urinating, Frolander said she would have to review “videos” to determine “what did or did not occur.”
Frolander also said she wasn’t aware that Nuxall believed police committed misconduct, but she now is after receiving a copy of the lawsuit that The Oregonian/OregonLive sent her.
Hopes of clearing her name disappear
In April 2025, about a month after prosecutors dropped the charges against Nuxall, she began requesting the test results of her blood and urine samples so she could clear her name, according to her lawsuit.
The city repeatedly told her the samples were still being tested or were in the possession of the state crime lab, according to the suit.
At one point, the suit says, the district attorney’s office told the city that — with the charges dismissed — it could destroy the meth pipes, the jar of meth and the blood and urine samples that police had said formed the bedrock of their case against Nuxall.
“On or about September 24, 2025, Ms. Nuxall discovered that the City of Enterprise destroyed the evidence they claimed incriminated her, thus eliminating Ms. Nuxall’s ability to prove her innocence,” the suit states.
Even so, Williams, Nuxall’s attorney, said that he was able to obtain the body-worn camera video, which hadn’t been destroyed, through a records request.
Nuxall’s lawsuit says the two officers who arrested her and possibly the police chief, McQuead, shared the video of Nuxall urinating with others in the police department.
The suit also says that although the charges have been dismissed, local media had publicized the “extremely shameful” charges and that has tarnished Nuxall’s reputation and job prospects. The suit says several parents have refused to allow their children to associate with Nuxall’s children, who are middle- and high-school-aged, because of her arrest.
Nuxall seeks the $300,000 in damages for her alleged “humiliation,” “physical and emotional pain” and violations of her “constitutional right to privacy in intimate bodily functions.”
The lawsuit was filed July 23 in Wallowa County Circuit Court.
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