Baton Rouge police tortured detainees at ‘Brave Cave,’ lawsuits allege

CNN
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The Louisiana FBI has been asked to assist the Baton Rouge Police Department in its criminal and internal investigation after attorneys filed a second federal lawsuit against the department, several individual police officers and the city in connection with an alleged torture warehouse called “the brave cave”. ”, according to a complaint.

“The Baton Rouge Police Department is committed to addressing these troubling allegations and has opened administrative and criminal investigations,” the police department said in a statement to CNN on Wednesday.

Police Chief Murphy Paul has asked FBI officials for their “assistance in ensuring an independent review of these complaints,” the statement said.

The latest lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court, says Ternell Brown, a Baton Rouge grandmother, was pulled over by Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) patrol officers while riding in her car with the her husband in June 2023. Brown wore two different. type of prescription pills in the same container, “which she legally had,” he says.

“Because the BRPD officers deemed this behavior to be ‘suspicious,’ she was taken to the BRPD black site, where she was forced to show the officers that she was not concealing contraband in her vagina or rectum. In her head for more than two hours, they let her go without charge,” the complaint states. Her husband was not transferred to Cova Brava, according to the complaint.

The lawsuit alleges that the officers involved in the search “were not acting as rogue officers when they sexually humiliated Ms. Brown; rather, they were simply carrying out official BRPD policy … (which) instructs officers that they can conduct these invasive searches whenever they have “reasonable suspicion of patting” a detainee. This policy is directly contrary to long-standing United States Supreme Court jurisprudence.”

This latest lawsuit comes just over three weeks after Baton Rouge Mayor Sharon Weston Broome announced that Troy Lawrence Jr., one of the officers involved in the black spot operation, had resigned amid an investigation into the ‘subject.

The mayor said she was previously unaware of the facility and had “instructed Chief Paul to suspend all operations at the facility pending a thorough investigation by the BRPD.”

The site, officially known as the Narcotics Processing Facility, “has been permanently closed and officers from the Street Crimes Unit have been disbanded and reassigned,” according to the police department’s statement.

Lawrence served as the department’s deputy chief of patrol operations, according to the city ​​website. He is named in two lawsuits filed about the Cova Brava.

CNN has reached out to attorneys for Troy Lawrence, the police union and others named in the lawsuit for comment, but has not yet heard back.

In a lawsuit filed last month, 21-year-old Baton Rouge resident Jeremy Lee alleges he was taken to the warehouse on Jan. 9, 2023, and beaten while officers periodically turned his body cameras on and off. .

Before being taken to the warehouse, Lee had been detained at a home “without reasonable suspicion or probable cause,” the complaint said. They forced him down in the middle of the street, pulled down his pants so they could search him – in public – and the officers grabbed his genitals. When he asked why he had been stopped, the officers refused to tell him why, according to the complaint.

Officers used “excessive force” that resulted in injuries that led to an urgent care visit where he was diagnosed with a “fractured left rib, chest pain and left facial pain,” the complaint said.

Lee was charged with “resisting an officer,” according to the lawsuit, which states police did not provide a reason for his arrest.

In a statement provided to the CNN affiliate WBRZChief Paul, who is among those named in the lawsuits, says the investigation will take time.

“I understand that everyone wants to do well, but investigations take time,” he said. “We have to get it right, and sometimes I can’t give it to you right now. But I assure you there will be a thorough investigation.”

Jessica F. Hawkins, one of the attorneys representing both plaintiffs, said in a press release that she “receives calls daily from Baton Rouge residents who were taken to this black site and illegally searched.” These cases of abuse must be properly investigated and dealt with and whoever committed these atrocities must be held accountable.”