http://thenewsherald.com/stories/08...050821003.shtml

Wrongly convicted woman now sues officers

By Jason Alley, The News-Herald


PUBLISHED: August 21, 2005 DETROIT — Fifteen-year-old Dominque Brim was nowhere near the Lincoln Park Sears store on April 15, 2002.

Yet, she was later charged and convicted as if she had tried to rob the place that afternoon.


Now that police detectives and the judge who presided over her case admit they went after the wrong person, the Detroit woman is suing the city of Lincoln Park and four of its police officers.

In a lawsuit filed Aug. 4 in Wayne County Circuit Court, Brim, now 19, says she was put on trial in Wayne County Juvenile Court for a crime committed by a woman pretending to be her.

Brim was convicted on charges that could have sent her to a juvenile lockup until she turned 21.

"It's extremely upsetting and disturbing to be convicted of a crime you know you didn't do," said her attorney, Gary Blumberg.

According to the suit, Chalaunda Munsel Latham of Taylor was arrested at Sears for attempting to steal $1,300 worth of clothing and severely biting a store security guard who stopped her.

When police arrived, they detained Latham, who told officers her name was Dominque Brim. She gave them Brim's address as her own and was released within hours.

After reviewing the case, using the information that police had gathered, prosecutors brought charges two months later — against Brim.

"The first time she knew anything about this is when she got a letter to appear in juvenile court," Blumberg said.

The teen's family hired attorney Akbar Rasul to fight the case, but he was unsuccessful in convincing authorities that they had the wrong person on trial.

After a Sears security guard testified during a one-day trial that the person who tried to rob the store was Brim, a juvenile judge convicted the girl on a felony charge of assault with the intent to do great bodily harm less than murder. She also was convicted of retail fraud.

After the case was heard, Sears came up with a store security tape that proved Brim wasn't the person responsible. Her conviction was overturned before she was sentenced.

"All the way through, my client was telling them she had nothing to do with it," Blumberg said. "But no one listened. ... Had they produced their in-store video earlier, all of this would have been avoided.

About a year ago, the attorney sued Sears and settled the case out of court for an undisclosed amount of money. Sears officials did not return calls for comment.

Now, Blumberg said, it's time to go after the Lincoln Park Police Department.

The suit names officers Charles Kaminski, William Kish III, James Nowaske and Robert Steele. Kaminski and Nowaske have since retired.

"You can't blame the police when someone says, 'I am so and so,' and you do everything you can do to confirm that's true," Blumberg said. "But the Lincoln Park Police Department didn't do that."

The lawsuit says officers were grossly negligent by failing to properly identify the person they had in custody and for failing to investigate the case properly.

Most disturbing, Blumberg said, is that officers outright released a suspect they believed to be a minor hours after they booked her.

"They don't turn her over to juvenile authorities or to her parents," he said. "They just let her go. Had they turned her over to juvenile authorities, they may have figured out she wasn't who she was saying she was. I don't know what they did or didn't do, but turning her loose wasn't right."

According to their own report, it's unclear what officers did that night.

"The mother was advised of the situation and stated that she would be down to the station within one hour to pick up her daughter," the report says.

It never says, however, if that ever happened, nor does it say who the mother is. It's unknown whose phone number Latham gave, claiming it to be her mother's.

Blumberg said he's surprised that Latham, who was 25 at the time, was able to impersonate a teen-ager to both the police and the courts.

"You can clearly see an age difference between the two," he said. "When I saw (Latham's) picture, I could tell right away she was not a 15-year-old girl."

Latham is a friend of Brim's sister and that's how she knew so much of the girl's personal information, Blumberg said.

While officers arrested Latham a few months later on an unrelated matter, they never charged her in connection with this crime because the eyewitness had already testified that someone else was responsible.

"Because of the fact Sears employees positively identified (Brim) as the person involved in the retail fraud, it is not possible to charge Latham with the charge of retail fraud," the police report says.

Lincoln Park City Attorney Edward Zelenak dismissed the seriousness of the lawsuit, saying that Brim's "inconvenience was minimal."

"As the case develops, more facts will come forward to show that the Police Department acted appropriately with the information they had at that time," Zelenak said. "This was clearly a misidentification that began from the onset." Contact Staff Writer Jason Alley at or at 1-734-246-0867.

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