An Illinois man has filed a lawsuit against the Springfield Police Department after officers told him his daughter’s ashes tested positive for drugs during a traffic stop.
Dartavius Barnes says he was stopped in April 2020 and told officers they were welcome to search his car. After they discovered a container filled with a powdery substance, officers told Barnes it had tested positive for meth or ecstasy, surveillance video shows. “No, no, no, bro,” Barnes can be seen saying. “That’s my daughter.” The video shows the cops laughing about their mistake a short time later, with one saying he’d “pi**ed off” Barnes by “testing the dead baby ashes.”
Dartavius Barnes alleges that officers with the Springfield Police Department unlawfully took the sealed urn containing his daughter’s ashes and opened it without his consent, spilling some of them during testing https://t.co/sUX3XMIlW8
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 21, 2021
In a lawsuit filed Friday, the 25-year-old Barnes claims the officers desecrated his daughter’s ashes by opening the urn, adding they even spilled some of her ashes onto the roadway. He;s suing for an unspecified amount.
Will this be an easy victory for Barnes? Would it have been an easy victory if the cops hadn’t laughed about it?
