The other people who signed onto Perez’s lawsuit have also told their stories for the first time. Their further revelations, including confinement in fetid and humiliating conditions, now mark 17 first-hand accounts of detention at Homan Square since the Guardian began reporting on the warehouse in February. The most recent occurred fewer than three weeks before the initial report.
Jose Martinez is alleged to have been cuffed to a bench for nine hours before being booked at an actual police station in September 2011. He claims that he was shackled “without food, water or use of the restroom” in a “locked room that smelled like urine and feces”.
Two other individuals, Estephanie Martinez and Calvin Coffey, described relieving themselves while shackled in Homan Square interrogation rooms. Martinez, locked up in August 2006, was told by a guard that she did not have the key to Martinez’s handcuffs and could not take her to the bathroom. Coffey, taken to Homan Square on 6 February 2015 on su ion of “narcotic activity”, defecated on the floor after two hours of fruitless requests for the bathroom. A police officer “made Calvin clean it up with his skull cap”, the lawsuit alleges.
Juanita Berry was with Coffey at the time of his detention and was taken with him to Homan Square. Handcuffed to a “ring or a bar on the wall” at Homan Square, the lawsuit alleges, officers told her to get them two handguns “or else they would charge her with aiding in the delivery of controlled substance”. After “several hours and many threats”, Berry agreed.
After Berry acquired a gun from an unspecified acquaintance, satisfied police allegedly drove her to a Dunkin’ Donuts and let her go without charge.
Berry’s account echoes that of a different Chicago man, not a party to the lawsuit, whom the Guardian has separately interviewed. The man, whom the Guardian has agreed to identify as Young OG so as not to risk his further police harassment, said Homan Square police kept him detained for nearly an entire day before he agreed to get them guns.
Young OG, a black man in his 30s, was picked up by masked police, guns drawn, after he stopped at a gas station with a friend in late 2013 for cigarettes. It was mid-morning and Young OG was confused over whether he was getting robbed or stopped by police.
“It was a real-life kidnapping,” he said.
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Sociopath swooping in with a huge false narrative.
