Hamdi Ali Osman lost the last six years of her freedom, spending four of them behind bars. Now, she’s filed a lawsuit claiming a St. Paul police officer’s lies put her there.

Osman, 26, is seeking $2 million per year she was in pretrial detention, for a total of $12 million in damages.

Osman was one of 30 people charged in a major federal sex-trafficking case that allegedly involved juvenile victims and stretched from the Twin Cities to Nashville, Tenn. Last month, a federal appeals court blasted the handling of the case and then prosecutors dismissed charges against Osman and others.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals underscored the district court’s findings that the lead investigator, St. Paul police Sgt. Heather Weyker, “likely exaggerated or fabricated important aspects” of an alleged victim’s story, that she lied to a grand jury and later during a detention hearing, according to the finding filed on March 2.

Three and a half weeks ago, Osman was released from the county jail in Bowling Green, Ky., where she said she and other inmates spent 23 hours a day locked in their cells. She’d been there for four years and on home arrest for two years.

Like most of the others charged in the case, Osman is originally from Somalia. She moved to the United States when she was 2 and is a permanent resident.

“Ms. Osman and the vast majority of the co-defendants are … very normal Americanized kids and young adults,” said Andrew Irlbeck, one of the attorneys representing Osman in the lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday. “They grew up here, they speak perfect English, they’re educated in the American educational system, they know just as much about civics and justice as anybody who’s grown up in the United States. … It’s easy for people to look at this and say, ‘Well, it happened to them because they’re Somali’ or to say, ‘They must have been up to no good,’ but that was not the case. This is one of those cases where everyone should think, ‘If this could happen to her, this can happen to anybody.’ ”

The suit names Weyker and the city of St. Paul. The St. Paul Police Department does not comment on litigation, the St. Paul city attorney said he would not speak about the lawsuit “until we have further reviewed the case,” and the attorney for the St. Paul police union attorney declined to comment.

‘A nightmare’

Osman grew up in South Minneapolis and, after high school, headed to Nashville in 2008 to live with friends. Around that time, she received a call from a juvenile she knew from the Somali community in Minneapolis.

The girl said she was coming to stay with Osman in Nashville. Osman told her she couldn’t live with her, but she would allow her to stay until her mother came to get her. The girl’s mother retrieved her the next day, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleges that “Weyker knowingly and intentionally manipulated, defrauded, threatened, coerced and pressured” the girl “into fabricating evidence and testimony that her visit to Nashville was solicited by Osman for the purpose of commercial sex. This was demonstrably false, and Weyker knew it.”

The lawsuit continued, “Weyker also attempted to manipulate, threaten, pressure, defraud and coerce two other young women who knew Osman into framing Osman as a ‘Madam,’ but these young women ultimately resisted … and told Weyker the truth: … that they were not … sex-trafficked or pimped, that Osman was in no way involved in any commercial sex-trafficking of minors. Weyker ignored this and voluminous other exculpatory evidence, and instead continued with her perfidious scheme.”

In 2010, Osman said she was working at Jennie-O in Willmar, Minn., when a large number of federal agents showed up and told her she had a warrant for her arrest in Tennessee.

“I thought it was a traffic ticket,” said Osman, speaking Thursday in St. Paul with her attorneys by her side — Irlbeck, Jeff Storms and Paul Applebaum.

“Little did she know it was just the beginning of a six-year ordeal,” Irlbeck said.

“A nightmare,” Osman added.

Pretrial detainees for federal cases in Tennessee are held in jail in Kentucky and, unlike state cases, there is not a presumption of bail, Irlbeck said. Most of the others accused in the case, who have also been cleared of charges, spent years in federal custody, too, he said.

While prisons have schooling and programs for inmates, county jails do not because they are meant to hold people for shorter amounts of time, Irlbeck said. Osman said she often passed the time by reading and thinking about “my freedom, my family.”

Internal investigation on hold

St. Paul police began an internal affairs investigation into Weyker on March 3, the day after the court’s finding was filed, and they placed her on paid administrative leave. On March 9, Weyker returned to work and the department put the internal investigation on hold.

“We are waiting for more information from the federal agencies before we move forward,” police spokesman Steve Linders said Thursday.

David Boling, spokesman for the U.S attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said Thursday that his office is “in the process of putting together documents and obtaining the necessary court orders to provide them (St. Paul police) with the records they might need for their investigation.”

Weyker, who was most recently a juvenile investigator, is now assigned to the department’s research and development in a noninvestigative position, Linders said.

The lawsuit also alleges that Osman’s federal civil rights were violated by St. Paul’s “longstanding and widespread practice of deliberate indifference to its officers’ practice of fabricating evidence to falsely formulate probable cause, and the city’s failure to supervise and discipline Weyker.”

The suit continued: “By the end of 2012, at the very latest, St. Paul, its police department, and Weyker’s supervisors were all aware of the nature and extent of Weyker’s fabricated evidence in a case that garnered news headline after news headline.”

But Osman and others were still detained for years, Irlbeck said.

Now, Osman has returned to Minnesota and is staying with her family in St. Paul. She’s been getting acclimated to her freedom and is looking for a job; she’s interested in being a certified nursing assistant.

“Ms. Osman always knew the accusations against her were a lie but … she had a fundamental faith in way the criminal justice system functions,” Irlbeck said. “Of course, when you realize that one cop can tell a lie that takes six years of your life away, it starts to make you wonder whether that system really works for you. It took six years, but the system did work for her. And now this is the second half of the system working for her, the civil case.”