Fresh off of backlash from the fatal shooting of Air Force Senior Airman Roger Fortson just last month, Florida’s Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office is facing another suit following an incident that left a Black mother and her children traumatized.
LaTanya Griffin claims that, on the night of Aug. 29, 2019, deputies from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office burst into her home with a battering ram to execute a search warrant and forced her out of her home at gunpoint while nude. Her suit claims her 6-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son witnessed the entire ordeal.
In another recent claim, Griffin alleges a similar situation happened May 28, 2020, but this latest event was even more humiliating than the first.
Read more from NBC News:
The latest suit alleges the May 2020 incident bore “striking similarity to the August 29th seizure.” The second incident involved the execution of an arrest warrant before dawn at Griffin’s two-story home in a modest residential community directly parallel to a busy public roadway, according to the lawsuit. The suit contends Carpenter failed to exercise his supervisory authority to stop the constitutional violation.
Once they were outside her residence, Griffin’s children watched her “during her naked detention for a substantial amount of time,” the lawsuit says, adding that her hands were zip-tied or handcuffed behind her back. Though she objected, Griffin remained naked in the presence of multiple law enforcement officers, the suit says. The deputies eventually placed a tank top over her head, “providing partial covering but not concealment of her genitalia,” the suit says.
Since the 2020 incident, Griffin’s attorney says she relocated to the northern part of the state; relocation expenses are included in the unspecified damages she seeks, per the report. She also claims her Fourth Amendment rights were violated, along with claims of mental anguish, emotional distress, embarrassment and humiliation.