MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – After retiring from the Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division in 2010 with 28 years, Modestyne Mack decided to use her retirement check to buy the car she’d always wanted: a brand new, jet-black Cadillac.
It was a nice car – too nice for a black woman, said the Memphis police officers who pulled her over one late night in February 2011, according to Mack, 61.
When additional squad cars began arriving, Mack asked, tongue-in-cheek, if she’d killed someone. “And they said, ‘Shut up.’ That’s when they snatched me out of the car and ‘cuffed us.”
Officers found drugs on her son – planted by the officers, she suspects – and for the next four hours “terrorized” them, called them racial slurs, and used her keys to enter her home without a search warrant despite her scared family’s demands to see one, she said.
Mack and her son were charged with possession with intent to sell or distribute, although her charge was dismissed. She filed an Internal Affairs complaint against the eight officers involved, and complained again when officers began parking outside her house.