Elderly Texas Couple Sue Police After Being Held At Gunpoint, Mistaken For Teenagers

When Armstead and Lewis were con­front­ed by police, the offi­cer acti­vat­ed the emer­gency lights and ordered the cou­ple to pull over.

“So I tried to move over to the right side because I thought they were try­ing to get by, and so they got behind me again and I turned the radio down and I could hear them say­ing, turn the car off and throw the keys out of the win­dow and all of that stuff,” Armstead said.

According to the law­suit filed by the cou­ple on August 4, 2022, against the City of Rosenberg, its police depart­ment and five of its offi­cers were look­ing for a group of Black teenagers who alleged­ly bran­dished a gun to a group of kids and then fled in a white vehi­cle with tint­ed win­dows and black rims that day. Armstead was dri­ving a white Dodge Charger sim­i­lar to the car the teens report­ed­ly got away in, lead­ing to the traf­fic stop.

“They pulled us over because they were look­ing for three teens with a gun who were shoot­ing at some oth­er teens, and I said, if that’s the case, they’re gone now, you’re fool­ing with us,” Armstead said of the incident.

The suit alleges, the offi­cers ordered Armstead out of the car and onto the ground, and on her knees as an officer’s gun remain point­ed at her. She was then hand­cuffed and placed in the back of a police car. Meanwhile, Lewis, a dial­y­sis patient was also hand­cuffed. He says when offi­cers placed him in hand­cuffs, it posed a seri­ous heath risk.

“When they put them hand­cuffs on me, I told them, I can’t have noth­ing on my arm at all because that will mess up my fis­tu­la,” Lewis said.

Despite telling offi­cers of his med­ical con­di­tion, the offi­cers dis­re­gard­ed those warn­ings caus­ing the med­ical devices in Lewis’ wrist to mal­func­tion result­ing in three med­ical pro­ce­dures accord­ing to the law­suit. While the cou­ple remained detained, offi­cers then searched their car and it was not until near­ly an hour lat­er did the focal point of the traf­fic stop get addressed, Lewis and Armstead were not the teenagers the offi­cers were after.

“We didn’t favor the three guys they were look­ing for, but they should have known that when they pulled me out of the car that I was not one of the guys,” Armstead said.

“There were a num­ber of con­sti­tu­tion­al vio­la­tions that we alleged, the obvi­ous­ly exces­sive force with the bran­dish­ing of the guns, the hand­cuff­ing of Mr. Lewis, the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the stop in the first place, whether there was rea­son­able sus­pi­cion based on the fact that there wasn’t a very clear match between our clients and the sus­pects the police were look­ing for,” said Lauren Bonds, the attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing the cou­ple in the lawsuit.

Rosenberg Police Chief Jonathan White regard­ing the law­suit and alle­ga­tions with­in it.

“The Rosenberg Police Department is aware of media sto­ries involv­ing a law­suit filed against the police depart­ment regard­ing an inci­dent on November 6, 2020. While we are dis­ap­point­ed in the amount of incor­rect infor­ma­tion found in the plaintiff’s com­plaint and media arti­cles, we will respect our jus­tice sys­tem by respond­ing to the appro­pri­ate court with fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion,” White’s state­ment said.

Bonds says, her office tried to get their hands on body cam­era video of the traf­fic stop, but were told by a pub­lic records city offi­cial, “they don’t have a video from the stop” lead­ing Bonds to ques­tion if the offi­cers ever acti­vat­ed their body cam­eras or dash cam­eras or if the footage was deleted.

Bonds described via email her efforts to obtain police offi­cials account of what hap­pened dur­ing the stop:

“The only record of the stop we received was an inci­dent report that includ­ed next to no details. We made sev­er­al pub­lic infor­ma­tion act requests between April and June of this year for any record that men­tioned our clients names, their license plate num­bers, as well as requests for doc­u­ments for stops made at the time and date that our clients were stopped. Rosenberg’s pub­lic records offi­cer informed us that no such doc­u­ments exist­ed. Unfortunately they were not able to tell us if the doc­u­ments pre­vi­ous­ly exist­ed but were lat­er destroyed pur­suant to a depart­men­tal records reten­tion pol­i­cy or if they were nev­er cre­at­ed in the first place. 

“We are eager to hear RPD’s response to the alle­ga­tions in the com­plaint. Not only to our clients’ alle­ga­tions but to the dozens of oth­er civil­ians who alleged they expe­ri­enced or wit­nessed sim­i­lar misconduct.”

The law­suit has an unspec­i­fied dol­lar amount of dam­ages at this time. In addi­tion to poten­tial mon­e­tary dam­ages, anoth­er aim of the law­suit is to per­suade Rosenberg police to change the way they inter­act with the City’s non-white population.

“I want it to be bet­ter for peo­ple around here because they mess with a lot of peo­ple of col­or,” Armstead said of the intend­ed pur­pose of the lawsuit.

Armstead and Lewis say they did not receive any cita­tions dur­ing the traf­fic stop by Rosenberg police.