Virginia attorney files federal lawsuit against Roanoke Police Department
A Virginia lawyer has filed a federal lawsuit against Roanoke police, alleging a SWAT team forcibly searched her home as an act of retaliation after she successfully defended her stepson on murder charges.
Cathy M. Reynolds said in the complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Roanoke that the September 2019 search was racially motivated and carried out with the excuse that a homicide suspect in an unrelated case had visited her stepson or might be living with him.
Reynolds, who is Black, said in her complaint that her stepson’s acquittal angered local law enforcement, including two White city police officers who had questioned her stepson during the homicide investigation or testified against him at trial.
The two officers — Lt. John Haley and Sgt. Joel Camp — took part in the search of her home on Sept. 29, 2019, three days after her stepson was found not guilty of murder and released, the complaint says.
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Camp and Haley said Thursday that they couldn’t comment on pending litigation. The officers referred questions to Timothy Spencer, the Roanoke city attorney. Spencer said the lawsuit was unfounded.
“We do believe many, if not most, of the allegations contained in the complaint are not true, and we believe that clear evidence will demonstrate such,” Spencer said. He said Reynolds’s own court pleadings acknowledge that police searched her house with a warrant, though Reynolds is challenging the warrant’s validity.
The search warrant was based on Camp’s affidavit stating that a federal agent had forwarded a tip from a confidential informant about the location of a teenager police had charged with murder in an unrelated case, court records show.
The federal lawsuit, which was first reported by the Roanoke Times, comes as the nation struggles with inflamed tensions over race and policing since the death of George Floyd last year. On Tuesday, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — who restrained Floyd by pressing his knee to his neck, resulting in Floyd’s death — was convicted on murder and manslaughter charges.
Reynolds’s complaint traces the search of her home to March 2019, when her stepson, Darreonta Lamar Reynolds, then 24, became a suspect in a homicide investigation.
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Roanoke police, including Camp, questioned Reynolds about a fatal shooting that happened on Feb. 24 at a Triangle Mart in northwest Roanoke, according to the complaint and local media accounts. Police said an off-duty store employee, Jean De Dieu Nkurunziza, 26, was killed after quarreling with the gunman, who drove off in a black Lexus.
Cathy Reynolds, whose Linked In account identifies her as an immigration lawyer, accompanied her stepson to police headquarters and acted as his attorney when he voluntarily submitted to the questioning, the complaint says. Following his March 5 indictment, Cathy Reynolds continued to represent her stepson as part of his defense team.
Prosecutors argued that Darreonta Reynolds quarreled with Nkurunziza after Nkurunziza had an interaction with Reynolds’s girlfriend that made him jealous.
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News accounts of the trial say witness testimony and security videos showed that the two men scuffled and Nkurunziza retrieved a handgun from the store to confront Reynolds. Reynolds fired once, killing Nkurunziza, before driving off. Toxicology results found that Nkurunziza, a 26-year-old Tanzanian immigrant, had been drinking and using methamphetamine.
Darreonta Reynolds admitted to the shooting but said he did so in self-defense. His stepmother was at his side in the courtroom when the jury returned a not-guilty verdict after 90 minutes of deliberations.
Three days later, police searched the Reynoldses’ home. Before the search began, the complaint alleges that one officer — who had visited the home in March 2019 while seeking to question her stepson — made a remark about recently completed renovations to the home that Cathy Reynolds said she interpreted as a threat, the complaint says.
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“I see you got your house done,” the complaint quotes the officer as saying.
“My client, I believe, took it as a threat when they said, ‘It looks like you got a lot of work done to the house’ and then tore up the house,” said Joshua H. Erlich, an Arlington civil rights attorney.
The search warrant, which was filed with the lawsuit, said an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives, citing a trusted informant, reported that a murder suspect in an unrelated case had been seen with Darreonta Reynolds. The warrant said the suspect, Ozmeik Rae’Quan Clements, had been spotted on the front porch of the Reynoldses’ home. The informant had seen Clements there more than once and believed he could be living there, court documents said.
Cathy Reynolds’s lawsuit and her attorney said they believe the information in the warrant was fabricated or based on a tip that had not been properly corroborated.
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“It is our strong belief that that confidential informant does not exist,” Erlich said.
Reynolds also alleges that the two-hour search went far beyond the scope of what would have been necessary to locate a person and damaged many things in her home. Police didn’t find Clements, then 17, at her home. He was arrested later and pleaded guilty to killing Savion Scales, 17, according to news reports.
Erlich said that the raid was solely intended to terrorize the Reynolds family because police made a forced entry into the home even though she had consented to the search and a warrant was unnecessary. Erlich also said the suspect, Clements, was unknown to Cathy Reynolds and her husband.
“I’m pretty sure he’s also unknown to her stepson,” Erlich said.
Reynolds’s lawsuit asserts that the search on her house was racially motivated because she was singled out while the White attorneys who she worked alongside to defend her stepson were not subjected to a search.
Roanoke Police Chief Sam Roman did not respond to an email and telephone call seeking comment.
Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
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