“I called 911 for help,” she later said in court. “I didn’t call 911 to be the victim.”
Within
minutes, two police officers responded. One took her 15-year-old
brother outside to speak to him. The other cop, Police Officer Ladmarald
Cates, gave her boyfriend $10 and told him to go the store and get some
water. She told him that he was welcome to chilled water from her
refrigerator.
“I only drink bottled water,” Cates said.
Her
boyfriend has a pronounced limp and set off with no promise of
returning soon. Cates asked to see the broken window and she led him
down a narrow hallway to a bathroom in the back. She felt sure that
jealous neighbors had attacked her happy home because she dared to defy
what seemed surely to be her fate as an inner-city teenage single mom.
“I wanted to be a good example to my kids,” she would later say. “I wanted to learn something, be somebody.”
She
had returned to high school as a mother of two and after graduation she
had continued on to the University of Wisconsin, where she was studying
criminal justice with the thought of becoming police officer or a
lawyer.
“I thought I was going pretty good,” she would recall.

She
now stood on a floor littered with broken glass and pointed to the
brick. The cop she had summoned to protect her instead chose this moment
to grab the back of her head by her hair and sodomize her. Then he
raped her.
Her
revulsion in the aftermath was so visceral that she vomited as she ran
outside. The cop’s partner had become concerned when he did not
immediately see Cates and called for back-up. Other cops began arriving
and saw a woman screaming incoherently about being raped.
Cates
appeared and grabbed her by the waist, spinning her around. Her
swinging feet may or may not have struck the partner. She was handcuffed
and taken in, told at the stationhouse that she was being charged with
assaulting a police officer.
She
became more coherent but no less outraged and vocal as she continued
cry out from a holding cell that she had been raped. She also continued
to vomit. The other cops dismissed her as a liar.
After
12 hours, she was interviewed by internal affairs and taken to a
hospital, where a rape kit was used to collect evidence. She was then
taken to the county jail and held for four days before being released
without actually being charged.
She
took her story to the Milwaukee District Attorney’s office. A
prosecutor subsequently wrote, “While I did find the victim’s version of
events credible, I did not believe that her testimony would be strong
enough to successfully prosecute Officer Cates.”
In
other words, Cates was still a cop and she was still an inner-city
teenage single mom. She stopped going to school as she fell into a deep
depression, making two serious suicide attempts.
She
who had so desperately wanted to be a good example for her 3-year-old
boy and 2-year-old girl began to wonder if they should even be with her.
“Sad
and crying all the time,” she says. “I didn’t know if I wanted my kids
around, me being upset like that about something that happened to me.”
Meanwhile,
internal affairs confronted Cates with DNA evidence linking him and the
victim. He told three different stories, finally saying there had been a
voluntary sexual encounter. His victim read in the newspaper that he
had been fired for lying and for “idling and loafing” on duty, words
that mocked what had been done to her.
“That really pissed me off,” she says.
She
took some comfort in knowing Cates was not going to be answering any
more 911 calls. But he still had not been held accountable for what he
did to her.
“It wasn’t really justice,” she says. “It didn’t say he hurt me.”
She
was sinking only deeper into despair when she went on the Internet and
chanced up a photo of an eminent Milwaukee defense lawyer named Robin
Shellow.
“She
had a beautiful smile,” the victim recalls. “It was just her smile and
the look in her eyes…She’s not mean and she’s a woman … She looked like
she could understand me...She looked like she would help.”
2 comMENTS:
Goddamn nigger
I hope that nigger was raped and killed after that?
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