An embattled Louisiana police department has been hit with a second lawsuit alleging officers from a street crime unit dragged detainees to an unmarked warehouse dubbed the “Brave Cave,” where they were assaulted, stripped and subjected to body cavity searches.
The latest allegations against the Baton Rouge Police Department were detailed in a lawsuit filed Monday by Ternell Brown, a 47-year-old grandmother, who said she was taken to a “torture warehouse” after officers making a traffic stop found bottles of legal prescription medication in her car.
“She was forced to show officers that she was not hiding contraband in her vagina or rectum,” the Baton Rouge woman’s complaint stated. “After more than two hours, they let her go without charge.”Brown’s lawsuit, which also named the city and the parish of Baton Rouge and several officers as defendants, was filed a month after another resident, Jeremy Lee, filed a lawsuit alleging that he was taken in January to the “Brave Cave” and beaten by the officers.
The street crime unit was disbanded after Lee filed his lawsuit, which included a body camera image of the 22-year-old perched on a chair in what appears to be a mostly empty warehouse.
“It’s essentially an unmarked interrogation warehouse where Baton Rouge citizens have been getting taken for years, strip-searched and sometimes beaten,” Thomas Frampton, an attorney for Lee and Brown, said Thursday.
He said the officers named in the lawsuits “are well known for their brutality in the Baton Rouge community.”
“But this isn’t a case about individual rogue officers,” Frampton said. “This is about a level of institutional rot, and institutional responsibility for police misconduct that goes to the chief and the deputy chief and has been long-standing for years.”
He said he had heard from other alleged “Brave Cave” victims, who also plan to file lawsuits.
“There will be more,” Frampton said.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Murphy Paul Jr. said Thursday that he has requested a federal investigation and that his department is cooperating with the FBI. He referred a request for comment about the Brown lawsuit to the city, which has not responded.
Paul confirmed last month in a news conference that an internal investigation was underway and that the “Brave Cave” was a narcotics processing facility owned by the Baton Rough Parish. He said he was unaware it was being used to search detainees until Lee filed his lawsuit.
“We made a mistake on this one,” Paul told The Washington Post. “I’ve got to own that.”
Asked about a possible investigation, Lesley Hill, a spokesperson for the FBI office in New Orleans, said “we are aware of the allegations.”
“Per the DOJ (Department of Justice) guidelines, the FBI does not confirm or deny any investigations,” Hill said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
