A Bronx man has filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the city claiming he was wrongfully arrested on made-up charges of soliciting sex from an undercover cop—and the NYPD kept him behind bars for so long he missed his father's funeral. "It's very upsetting," 51-year-old security guard Clifton Quarles Jr. said in a statement issued to the Daily News. "My father was my best friend and I missed his funeral. I will have to live with that for a lifetime."
According to Quarles, after spending Jan. 7, 2009 making funeral arrangements for his father, a woman in a black mini-skirt offered him oral sex for $10 on a Bedford-Stuyvesant Street. Quarles says he laughed off the offer and walked away, but the woman—who was really an undercover cop—ordered him to stop and plainclothes cops put him under arrest. Even after explaining that his father's funeral was the next day (he was carrying his suit for the services at the time), the officers refused to issue him a summons or a desk appearance ticket, and instead kept him in custody for 24 hours, forcing him to miss all parts of the memorial except the burial.
In the months after the arrest, Quarles "refused to cut a deal because he wanted to clear the name he shared with his late father and mend ways with relatives angry over the arrest," the tabloid reports. It took him 10 court appearances before authorities dismissed the charges he was facing—but that only happened because the plainclothes officers who cuffed him—identified as Jason Ianno and Lenise Walker-Wilson—reportedly never showed up in court.
