FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. (WSVN) - A woman who was badly injured during a protest in Fort Lauderdale is sharing her story and, according to a report, may be preparing to take legal action over the incident.
The Miami Herald reported on Sunday that LaToya Ratlieff has hired attorneys, and they are considering legal action, including filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Fort Lauderdale and its police department.
Speaking to 7News on Monday, Ratlieff said she is still in pain. Her face and eyes are still bruised from the May 31 incident.
Ratlieff said she was peacefully protesting in Downtown Fort Lauderdale when an officer shot her in the face with a foam rubber bullet.
She said the impact fractured her eye socket.
“My eye actually started to open earlier this week, probably around this weekend, but it’s still very — I can’t focus,” said Ratlieff. “If I try to utilize my right eye, I can’t see anything. The vision’s very blurry.”
Ratlieff said she was walking to her car to go home when the peaceful protest took a turn.
Cellphone video captured a Fort Lauderdale Police Officer Steven Pohorence pushing a 19-year-old protester to the ground while she was kneeling with a Black Lives Matter sign.
“That took the crowd from the very peaceful event that had taken place for most of the day to a bit of an agitation,” she said.
Ratlieff said she then tried to help calm the crowd.
“There were still bullets at random, foam bullets being shot into the crowd,” she said. “We were being teargassed, and eventually it was too much, and that’s when the crowd started to disperse, and that’s when I went in the corner. There was a moment when a woman, she came over to help me and to provide aid, and within a second, I was shot by a Fort Lauderdale Police officer.”
Fort Lauderdale Police said investigators have tried reaching out to Ratlieff to no avail. They released a statement that reads in part: “All of the information about Ms. Ratlieff’s incident has been provided to the media, rather than to our city or to our investigators. We look forward to speaking with Ms. Ratlieff so that we may follow our formal investigative process of finding the truth about what happened.”
“I want the Fort Lauderdale Police Department to be held accountable,” said Ratlieff. “I think it’s important that their reforms are put into place so that something like this does not ever happen again.”
She said further, “I look forward to speaking with them and understand why, after I was shot and laying on the ground, not a single officer rendered aid. I would like to understand why there wasn’t a warning before they started to tear gas and continue to shoot rubber bullets out into the crowd. I’ve been contacted by the Internal Affairs Department, but at that time, I was still recovering. At that time, I was still dealing with the pain and the trauma from what took place.”
Ratlieff said she wants to know what police officers were told before they went into the protest, what their orders were and what will change so that this does not happen again.
Police said an internal investigation into the incident is currently underway.
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