Institutionalized For Owning A BMW!

I just thought I'd let you know before you read this story. As you're reading it, you won't believe it. You'll think that there has to be more to it than this. But, no, there isn't. As free as we think we are it seems as if our freedom is conditional. Our liberties are valid until someone in "authority" decides that they're not. 

In New York City, Kamilah Brock says the New York City police did just that when they sent her to a mental hospital for a hellish eight days, where she was forcefully injected with powerful drugs. It all began essentially because they couldn't believe a black woman owned a BMW. 

In her first on-camera interview about her ordeal, which aired last week, the 32-year-old told local media sources that it was all a "nightmare."

It's a nightmare, Brock's lawyer says, that never would have happened if she weren't African-American.  

Brock sued the city earlier this year in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She contends that her constitutional rights under the Fourth and 14th Amendments were violated and that she suffered "unwanted and unwarranted intrusion of her personal integrity, loss of liberty and mental anguish." 

The suit details how Brock pulled up to a traffic light in Harlem on Sept. 12, 2014 with the music on her car stereo playing loudly. An NYPD officer approached her and asked why she was driving without her hands on the steering wheel, according to the suit. 

"I said I was dancing, I am at a light," Brock said. "He asked me to get out of the car."

FYI. When a police officer asks you to "get out of the car", you have every right to refuse and request that a police supervisor be called to the scene.

For  no reason, Brock contends, she was taken into custody and transported to the NYPD's 30th Precinct, where she was held for a few hours before being released without being charged with any crime. She said she was told to come back the next day to pick up her car, a 2003 BMW 325Ci.

When she showed up at a police substation to get the car the next day, Brock said, "I just felt like from the moment I said I owned a BMW, I was looked at as a liar. They put me in handcuffs and said they just need to put me in handcuffs to take me to my car. And I said OK, whatever it's gonna take to get to my car."

"Then EMS approached me," she continued. "And they said we're gonna take you to your car. And I'm like, in an ambulance? I'm going to my car in an ambulance? I'm going to my car in an ambulance? I was just so confused."

Instead Brock was taken to Harlem Hospital, where medical records obtained by her attorney, Michael Lamonsoff, show she was injected with powerful sedatives and forced to take doses of lithium.

"He held onto me and then the doctor stuck me in the arm and I was on a stretcher and I woke up to them taking my clothes off, specifically my underwear," Brock tearfully recalled the story. "Then I went back out again. When I woke up the next day, I felt like I was in a nightmare. I didn't understand why that was happening to me." 

Medical records also show that over the course of her eight-day stay, personnel at the hospital repeatedly tried to get Brock to deny three things before she could be released: that she owned the BMW, that she was a professional banker, and that President Barack Obama followed her on Twitter. 

The lawsuit says it was these three assertions that were the basis for the city determining that Brock was delusional and to diagnose her with bipolar disorder. 

But according to Lamonsoff, Brock had no history of mental illness. She did own the BMW. At the time, she was employed as a banker and had worked at Citibank, Chase and Astoria Bank. And Obama does follow Brock on Twitter, just as he follows 640,000 other people. 

Then just to add insult to injury. When Brock was finally released from the hospital, the lawsuit states, she was slapped with a $13,000 medical bill.

A white woman would not have been treated like that, Lamonsoff argues.

PR