Naked and Bleeding: One Woman’s Story of What Happened When the Sheriff’s Came Through Her Front Door:
In July it had almost been a year when deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lancaster station armed with rifles and shotguns kicked in “Jane Doe’s” door without warning, and dragged her outside naked and bleeding from her menstrual cycle. It goes without saying that Jane Doe is a Black woman.
Twenty-four-year-old Jane Doe was home alone with her 5-year-old son and 13-year-old sister. Guns in hand, the deputies ordered a naked Jane Doe — who was upstairs getting out of the shower and had run to the stairs to see what the commotion was — to come downstairs naked. Screaming and asking to see the warrant and be allowed to get dressed, she was forced at gunpoint to come downstairs naked in front of a group of male deputies.
The deputies ignored her pleas not to tie her up and dragged her naked across her front lawn to the patrol car. Crying, Jane Doe recounts one of the deputies smiling and laughing at her naked body in the back of the patrol car.
“I was sitting in the back of the police car bleeding from my menstrual cycle,” she cries. “My aunt pulled up. The only way for me to identify to her that I was back there like that was to smear blood on the window to show her that I am back here undressed on my period.”
To add insult to injury, Jane Doe was arrested and charged with three counts of resisting arrest.
She’s currently represented by the Cochran Firm and has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the County of Los Angeles, citing a violation of her civil rights, battery, negligence, and negligent infliction of emotional distress, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Interestingly enough, since filing her lawsuit, the three counts of resisting arrest have been dropped.