Alleged racial profiling results in potential lawsuit against FMPD

FORT MYERS, Fla. – Incidents involving alleged racial profiling have resulted in a potential lawsuit against the Fort Myers Police Department.

Theresa Hamilton, who was detained while her home was searched, has given the department and the City of Fort Myers notice of her intent to sue.

Hamilton claims officers racially profiled her family during a drug raid on Nov. 2, 2015, according to legal documents. She joins three other men who filed complaints this month against FMPD over civil rights violations.

Michael McDonald, Terrance Lamar Scurry and William James Stevenson claim officers conducted illegal searches during two separate traffic stops in 2015. The searches involving McDonald, Scurry and Stevenson were less than two miles from Hamilton’s home, located south of the Fort Myers Stars Complex.

All four say the searches were drug related

Surprise raid

In a call to 9-1-1, Hamilton is yelling frantically.

“Yea, it’s somebody out here. I don’t know if it’s the police or — tell them to come in,” Hamilton is heard saying.

The dispatcher continues to call out “9-1-1. What is your emergency? Police, fire, ambulance.” After the first 30 seconds, you hear Hamilton speaking with officers:

 
Officers, piling out of vans and wearing wearing masks, broke through her door and tackled Hamilton’s boyfriend, Ben Cennady.

“They had bust in, threw him on the floor, mistaking him for somebody else,” Hamilton said.

It was a drug raid.

“When they come through that door, they had the guns pointed right at me. I’m talking about, not a little bitty, but a big gun,” Cennady said. “There’s about six of them or seven or eight of them coming through that door.”

Then officers searched the diaper of Hamilton’s 10-year-old daughter, who has disabilities.

“I turn around and see them looking in the front of my daughter’s diaper and the back of my daughter’s diaper and I’m like ‘Hey, what’s going on? Whatcha doing?'” she said.

There were no drugs.

Hamilton’s lawyer, Sawyer Charles Smith of Wilbur Smith Attorneys at Law, plans to argue that officers should not have searched Hamilton’s home nor her daughter’s diaper.

Sawyer said the onus for change should be a joint effort.

“Change needs to come to this community and it needs to come to FMPD,” he said. “This is an explosion waiting to happen and law enforcement is not helping a thing.”

Bad memories

Hamilton still remembers her daughter’s screams and has traumatic flashbacks.

“If somebody come up and knock on that door, it just — it is just starting all over again,” Hamilton said. “And that’s just like watching a horror movie, people busting in your house with masks on.”

Body cam footage from the incident shows Hamilton, her boyfriend and daughter handcuffed and seated outside their home on South Street.

Cennady asks “What draws y’all here?”

An officer replied that they had a search warrant for drugs.

“Don’t nobody sell drugs here,” Hamilton says in the video below. Then “My son in prison for drugs but he ain’t stay with me because I didn’t play that [expletive] right there. He know I ain’t play that [expletive]. This is a shocker to me.”