A very disturbing case of South Carolina police officers conducting a full cavity roadside search on a young African American man during what is reported to be an unjustified traffic stop has led to a federal lawsuit.



The incident happened at around 12pm on October 2014, but the story gained momentum in the media after dashboard camera footage from the patrol car was released by the Washington Post on Friday.

Lakeya Hicks was driving her newly purchased mid-1990s Honda Accord together with partner, Elijah Pontoon, near downtown Aiken, South Carolina, when Officer Chris Medlin pulled her over for having “paper tags on her car”. From the get-go, the officer’s actions seem unjustified, as it’s reportedly not illegal to use temporary tags in South Carolina, so long as they are not expired.

The Washington daily found a South Carolina case from 2000, where the presiding judge noted: “We cannot sanction the random stop of any and every car bearing a temporary tag, leaving in the hands of law enforcement officers the freedom to detain whomever they desire without having to justify why they chose to stop one motorist over another.”

Medlin didn’t stop there, as besides requesting the driver’s license, he also asked Pontoon, who was riding in the passenger seat, for identification – something he shouldn’t have been required to do even if the stop was legitimate, yet he complied. The officer does a background check, and tells Hicks that her license and tags check out. At this point, he should have left the couple leave, but instead, he first orders Hicks to get out of the car. Pontoon asks what’s going on, to which Medlin replies, “I’ll explain it all in a minute”.

Several minutes later, a female cop joins the scene with Medlin telling Pontoon “Because of your history, I’ve got a dog coming in here. Gonna walk a dog around the car”. Afterwards, he turns to Pontoon and says “You gonna pay for this one, boy.”

Apparently, Pontoon had a lengthy criminal history that involved drug charges, though his record seems to be clean since 2006, the Washington Post reports.

In the video, several more police officers arrive at the scene, including one with a dog, conducting a thorough search of the car, but they come empty handed, as no contraband was found.

Still, that wasn’t enough, as Medlin told a female officer to “search her real good”, referring to Hicks. While the body search was conducted off camera, the lawsuit from the couple states that the officer pulled “up her shirt” and exposed “Lakeya’s breasts in broad daylight and in the center of town with Defendant Medlin, Defendant Clark and Defendant John Doe standing mere inches away and watching every aspect of the search”.

Again, no contraband was found, so Medlin turns his attention to Pontoon, who in the meantime, had been cuffed. Officers performed a body search of Pontoon too, but for a second time, they didn’t find anything. Medlin, however, had no intention of giving up.

“You’ve got something here right between your legs,” says one of the officers in the video – with the lawsuit stating it was Medlin. “There’s something hard right there between your legs.”

The officer then proceeds to conduct an anal probe on Pontoon. While it was performed off camera, the audio captured leaves no doubt about what was going on.

Pontoon is heard saying one of the officers grabbed his hemorrhoids to which Medlin appears to say, “I’ve had hemorrhoids, and they ain’t that hard.”

According to the Post, at about 13 minutes into the video, “the audio actually suggests that two officers may have inserted fingers into Pontoon’s rectum, as one asks, ‘What are you talking about, right here?’ The other replies, ‘Right straight up in there.’”

Pontoon insists that it’s hemorrhoids. “If that’s a hemorrhoid, that’s a hemorrhoid, all right? But that don’t feel like no hemorrhoid to me,” one officer is heard saying. “It’s a rock. It’s a rock in the crack. It’s gotta be rock. He’s got it up in the butt,” the officer asserts.

Having pretty much exhausted their searching options bar from…performing an autopsy on Pontoon and his partner, and without having found any contraband whatsoever, Medlin then reportedly turns around to Pontoon to tell him that he suspected him because he had recognized him while working for narcotics. “Now I know you from before, from when I worked dope. I seen you. That’s why I put a dog on the car.”

With the couple coming out clean and not having violated any traffic laws, Medlin completed the stop by giving Hicks an unidentified in the complaint, “courtesy warning”. We’ll leave it your imagination as to what this warning said…

Pontoon’s lawyer Robert Phillips filed a federal lawsuit in September 2015 against the officers involved, the Director of the Aiken Department of Public Safety, and the City of Aiken. Officer Medlin, who is named in the law suit as a defendant, is still working for the police department, with the city denying any wrongdoing, in statement emailed to the Washington Post.

“The City of Aiken denies the Plaintiffs’ allegations and is vigorously defending this lawsuit. We will have no further comment about the facts of this case during the pendency of this litigation.”

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