Takesha Griffin, 35, said she was handcuffed to a bench in the squad room, then locked in a filthy holding cell at the 73rd Precinct in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Officers repeatedly asked the injured woman if she was ready to “cough up the real story” about how she got shot.
“They wanted me to lie,” said Griffin, whose lawyer filed a $5 million lawsuit against the city. “It was like ‘The Twilight Zone.’ “
The single mother of a 9-year-old boy said she was given a McDonald’s hamburger each day and ridiculed when she complained about the food. During her confinement, Griffin said she urinated on herself when no one was available to escort her to the bathroom. She was also denied a sanitary napkin.
“Who treats people this way?” Griffin said. “It’s inhumane.”
On her second day in the stationhouse, cops suggested she “change her story” if she wanted to leave.
“A police officer saw me still sitting there and said, ‘Did your story change yet? I guess you like it here,’ ” she said.
Griffin said she was shot on Sept. 3 as she was getting out of a male friend’s vehicle near her apartment in Brownsville, N.Y. She heard a noise and felt a burning sensation on her right thigh and noticed a spot on her leg where her tights bunched up into a hole. Pulling the bunched-up fabric, she saw a bullet pop out, followed by spurting blood.
Griffin’s friend drove her to Brookdale University Hospital. Hospital staff saw the wound and called police. Detectives suspected she had been shot during a lovers’ quarrel with her friend.
“He never had a gun,” she said. “I told them he was gay; we had gone to a gay club the night before.”
The friend offered to take a lie detector test and submit to a gunshot residue test on his hands, she said. He was released that morning; she was held.
Read more at NY Daily News.
Cited here: Rolling Out
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