A Long Island, N.Y., woman claims she spent eight days at a mental hospital, where she was injected with powerful drugs, after New York City Police Department officers refused to believe that a young black woman owned a BMW, according to the Huffington Post.
Michael Lamonsoff, a lawyer for the 32-year-old woman, Kamilah Brock, told the news outlet that the incident, which began on Sept. 12, 2014, occurred only because of her race.
Brock spoke for the first time about the episode on Thursday with PIX11. She sued the city earlier this year in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claiming a violation of her constitutional rights under the Fourth and 14th Amendments and that she suffered "unwanted and unwarranted intrusion of her personal integrity, loss of liberty [and] mental anguish," writes the Post.
The incident began when she stopped at a traffic light in New York City's Harlem community, with music blaring in her 2003 BMW 325Ci, the report says. She claims an officer approached the vehicle and asked why she was driving without her hands on the steering wheel. She reportedly explained that she was dancing at a stoplight.
From there, and for reasons that remain unclear, she says, she was hauled into custody and transported to the NYPD's 30th Precinct, the report says. After she was held for a few hours and released without charges, police told her she could pick up her car the next day. The story turns from bad to worse when she arrived at a police substation to do just that, she said in an interview with PIX11.
"I just felt like from the moment I said I owned a BMW, I was looked at as a liar," she told the news station. "They put me in handcuffs and said they just need to put me in handcuffs to take me to my car. And I said OK, whatever it's gonna take to get to my car."
Lamonsoff says that Brock was instead transported to Harlem Hospital, where he obtained medical records showing that she was injected with powerful sedatives.
The records reportedly show that "over the course of her eight-day stay, personnel at the hospital repeatedly tried to get Brock to deny three things before she could be released: that she owned the BMW, that she was a professional banker, and that President Barack Obama followed her on Twitter," writes the Huffington Post.
Read more at the Huffington Post and PIX11.
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