Lawsuit: Cops Trashed An Attorney's Home In Retaliation For Successfully Defending A Suspect Against Murder Charges
from the system-never-likes-being-beaten dept
An attorney in Virginia found out what happens when you make cops angry. According to Cathy Reynolds' lawsuit, the Roanoke PD targeted her for some extra attention after she successfully defended her stepson from murder charges.
Prosecutors really wanted Darreonta Reynolds for murder, but security camera footage from the convenience store where the shooting took place appeared to show Reynolds shooting Jean De Dieu Nkurunziza in self-defense when Nkurunziza came after him with a gun. The jury agreed with the defense's case, acquitting Reynolds after ninety minutes of deliberation.
This apparently angered someone somewhere in the Roanoke Police Department because this is what happened next. From the lawsuit [PDF]:
Just three days after D. Reynolds acquittal, Defendants targeted Ms. Reynolds for retaliation. Defendants broke down the front door of Ms. Reynolds‘ home after she had offered to let them in, "searched" Ms. Reynolds' home for an individual by destroying her personal possessions, including those entirely irrelevant to a search for a person and left Ms. Reynolds traumatized, knowing that she could be targeted by police for engaging in constitutionally protected activity.
There may be some open dispute about the motivation for these actions, but the actions themselves can't be denied. The raid drew a crowd, some of whom filmed the PD's violent entry into the unlocked house -- the same house Reynolds had left unlocked and invited the officers to search. It also attracted the attention of a local news crew.
The lawsuit fills out the details of the raid. And the narrative throws a considerable amount of shade at the participating officer with one impeccably worded paragraph.
Despite both screen door and storm door at the front entrance of Ms. Reynolds' home remaining unlocked, SWAT officers used an entry tool attached to the front of an armored vehicle to puncture the screen door and rip it free from Ms. Reynolds' home in its entirety.
In so doing, SWAT officers damaged the screen door beyond repair, heavily damaged the door frame surrounding the front entry, and tore vinyl siding from the exterior of Ms. Reynolds' newly remodeled home.
SWAT officers then entered Ms. Reynolds' home by turning the doorknob of the storm door which remained on Ms. Reynolds' home, still unlocked, and pushing the door open in the manner a door is designed to operate.
Nice.
But that wasn't the end of the destruction. Remember, officers were searching for a 17-year-old murder suspect, not an easily hidden amount of contraband.
During the search of Ms. Reynolds' home, SWAT officers opened and searched all the drawers in Ms. Reynolds' kitchen and detached Ms. Reynolds' appliances from the walls of her home.
SWAT officers flipped the mattresses off all the beds in Ms. Reynolds' home and tore all of the clothes from the closets in the bedroom.
SWAT officers tore the cushions off Ms. Reynolds' furniture and emptied the contents of open soda cans onto the floor.
What the fuck.
On top of that, Reynolds alleges the warrant affidavit was nothing but a bunch of lies stitched together carelessly to give the PD permission to destroy her house -- a warrant rendered unnecessary by Reynolds' consenting to a search hours earlier. The narrative in that affidavit involves an ATF officer, their CI, and the assumption that the most likely place for a wanted murderer to be hanging out would be at the house of an attorney who had just successfully defended someone from a murder charge.
Given the timing and the three hours of apparently gleeful destruction, this certainly looks retaliatory. And, of course, it will be portrayed by the PD as just regular old cop stuff completely unrelated to local prosecutors and PD detectives "losing" a murder case. The end result of these efforts can't be denied. Neither can the violent entry which was captured by citizens' cameras. All that's left is the defensive assertions of "reasonable" officers -- all of which felt tearing apart an attorney's house was the best way to locate a human being.
Filed Under: cathy reynolds, darreonta reynolds, intimidation, police, police brutality, roanoke, search warrant, swat teams, virginia
