BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — Two attorneys, Gary Chambers and Thomas Frampton, are speaking about their investigation into the Brave Cave, a warehouse in Baton Rouge where members of the Baton Rouge Police Department reportedly took members of the public for illegal searches and interrogations.
Attorney Ryan Thompson says that a federal lawsuit will be filed on Monday, Sept. 18. Thompson said on Juneteenth, his “client and her husband were stopped by the Baton Rouge Police Department.”
According to Thompson, during a vehicle search, a weapon and some prescription medication were found. The attorney said that the weapon was legally owned. Thompson said body-worn camera footage shows that the officer incorrectly told his client “it is illegal to have certain prescriptions with other prescriptions in a bottle.”
Thompson said his client tried to tell the officer that she could prove she had the prescriptions legally. The attorney said that the officer responded, “We’ll let the judge figure it out, to be exact.” He said his client was handcuffed and taken to the Brave Cave.
“What happened there was unconscionable. She was then strip-searched, there was also a visual body cavity search that was performed upon her where she was made to open up her butt cheeks as well as her vagina,” Thompson said.
Following Thompson at the microphone, criminal and constitutional law professor Frampton said, “countless Baton Rouge citizens have been subject to illegal, sexually humiliating strip searches.”
Civil rights advocate Chambers said, “We have a mayor and a chief of police who have given our community messages that we’ve had police reform and now under the veil of dark, we have seen that on this unmarked street, that people drive up with police officers, get walked into a warehouse, stripped searched, beat up, and there’s supposed to be camera footage of what takes place in this building.”
