What to Know
- Two men claim they were wrongfully arrested after cops went searching for a shooting suspect who matched their clothing description
- It happened in May in Harlem, Anthony Ross said during an exclusive interview with News 4
- The NYPD says the incident is under internal review
Two men in New York City claim they were wrongfully arrested in Harlem and say it was all because of their black shirts and pants.
Anthony Ross says he and his friend Saquan Eady were stopped by cops, slammed to the ground and taken into custody by police looking for a shooting suspect in May, Ross told NBC 4 New York in an exclusive interview.
“They were looking for a suspect that had on black, but it wasn’t us,” Ross said.
Ross said he was coming from work that May night when he ran into Eady near West 116th Street and Manhattan Avenue. A short time later, police pulled up and asked them if they had guns. Cellphone video shows Ross and Eady, who’s being held face down on the ground by police, being searched and handcuffed.
“They proceeded to search us,” Ross said. “They searched me three times. They had a helicopter shine a light on me so the witness let them know it wasn’t me, but they still proceeded to take me to the precinct.”
Ross claims it was there where he was stripped searched before police released him with a ticket for disorderly conduct, though he claims he doesn’t know why.
Local
“This is a definite stop and frisk scenario that they said they got rid of since 2014,” Kevin McCall, of the National Action Network, said.
The NYPD says the incident is under internal review. Police have not said whether they ever found the shooting suspect they were hunting for.
Despite not being the suspect they were looking for Eady, who is a parolee, is still behind bars. Although prosecutors say he is only charged with disorderly conduct, his mother says the run-in with police that night pushed him over his parole-mandated curfew, landing him back in jail.
“From the time the whole incident started he would have actually made it home,” Eady’s mother, Karen Mathurin, said behind tears.
Eady’s family is also accusing the NYPD of brutality for when they slammed him to the ground. The two men have filed a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
