Chandler, Ariz. – An Arizona woman has hired a lawyer after police handcuffed her while she was naked inside her own home. And much of the confrontation was caught on cellphone video by the woman’s daughter.
In the video you can hear the screams of a mother, wearing nothing but a towel. Moments later two Chandler police officers came into Esmeralda Rossi’s home.
“Put your hands behind your back,” one officer is heard saying.
And one of those officers would force her to stand naked and handcuffed.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” Rossi yells.
Rossi said the officers were at her home to ask about a domestic situation with her estranged husband. She said she had a bad feeling from the beginning.
“I said, ‘You know what, you’re making me very uncomfortable, I’m gonna get my daughter to record what’s happening because something’s not right here.’ So I close the door, I take about five to six steps into my living room and I hear the door open and boots coming after me,” she explained.
Her daughter’s cell phone captured what happened next. While officer Doug Rose confronts Rossi, she gets annoyed and starts talking back.
“Stay away from that family, I heard you the first time, I don’t need you to tell me the second. I’m not dumb,” she said.
Moments later, Officer Rose said he is taking her to jail. Rossi still has no clothes on and her 15-year-old daughter is there, watching the chaos the whole time.
“To hear them talk to my daughter and see her pain and see how much she wanted to save me,” Rossi said. “It hurt a lot.”
Eventually, the officer would uncuff Rossi and leave. But she followed up. According to an internal investigator’s report, officer Rose entered Rossi’s house illegally – and omitted key information in his police reports.
But before it could make it to his supervisors, Rose retired — and Rossi got a lawyer.
“They have an immense power that is given to them with that power comes great responsibility. The problem here is they used that power in a negative way,” said Richard Cruz, Rossi’s attorney.
Rossi is now vowing to fight back saying she was helpless that day, but not anymore.
“I felt like nothing, I felt unhuman I felt like I didn’t matter, I felt like I had no value to these people,” she said.
