When Llara Brook, 20, and her boyfriend, Josh Kelly, 22, traveled from Chantilly, Va., to Baltimore to see an Orioles game Saturday, they didn?t expect to end up in jail and get robbed. But after getting lost trying to find their way back to Interstate 95, these out-of-towners experienced a nightmare.
“I?m still in shock,” Brook, a child care worker whose parents are both police officers in Harrisburg, Pa., said of a weekend she would rather forget. “We were just lost.”
The couple stopped in the 800 block of Bridgeview Drive in Cherry Hill to ask a Baltimore police officer for directions. Brook said the officer was blunt: “You found your way in. You can find your way out.”
After writing a citation for failure to obey a stop sign ? a ticket Kelly disputes ? the officer told them to leave. Confused, the couple drove about “40 feet” and stopped.
“We still didn?t know how to get out,” Kelly said.
But the officer pulled up behind them and arrested Kelly for “trespassing,” according to the ticket.
“The officer said we were on private property,” Brook said. “But we were parked on a public street.”
Kelly said the officer told him that “no trespassing signs” were evident “up and down the block,” but he didn?t see any.
After Kelly?s arrest, Brook said, she was told to “get lost.” But because the car was being impounded, she didn?t know what to do.
“I didn?t know where to go, so [the officer] arrested me.”
“We were completely respectful,” Brook said. “I?ve been on the job with my father, and never seen anyone treated that way.”
Baltimore City police spokesman Troy Harris said he was not familiar with the incident, but would investigate it.
Brook?s mother, LuAnna, said that her main concern was the couple?s safety. “Their car was impounded,” she said. “If I didn?t have a badge, we wouldn?t have known were they were. They would have been put out [in] the street.”
LuAnna Brook, a Harrisburg patrol officer, said the Baltimore officer?s conduct was unwarranted. “These kids did nothing wrong,” she said. “If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone.”
To add insult to injury, after the couple paid $200 to get the car out of impound, they discovered they had been robbed. “All the CDs and the cell phone charger were taken,” LuAnna Brook said. “This is horrible.”
LuAnna Brook said the couple would file a complaint against the police department.
