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.
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“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, the parish of Baton Rouge and several officers as defendants, was filed a month after another resident, Jeremy Lee, filed a lawsuit alleging that in January he was taken to the “Brave Cave” and beaten by the officers.
The street crime unit called BRAVE, short for Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination, 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.
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"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.
The officers named in the lawsuits "are well known for their brutality in the Baton Rouge community," Frampton said.
