Before there was a fatal shooting inside the Juliet Supper Club last year, there was a fatal stabbing outside the club. And that case has led one woman to accuse the police of being pervs who poked around for sexy pics on her cellphone. To be fair, at least they weren't putting pics of the dead body on Facebook?
Shortly after the September 26th, 2011, stabbing of 23-year-old Christopher Adames, police arrested 41-year-old promoter Manuel Pinero and charged him with murder. Before he turned himself in, however, his 29-year-old girlfriend Tanya Vazquez was brought in for questioning. She says that she was at the 10th Precinct for 16 hours and says she "had not been treated with much respect." At all:
Police detained her when she attempted to leave the station house, and confiscated her cell phone, the complaint said. When she got her phone back, there was a self-taken naked picture of herself open on it, she said in the filing. "Now I know why every time an officer came into the precinct, they came to look at me in my cell," she wrote. "I could also hear chatter about me from the desk outside."
Which, yeah, doesn't sound good. For the moment the case has been brought to the attention of the Civilian Complaint Review Board where, in addition, the complaint charges that the police also used Vasquez's phone to make an unauthorized call to a suspect, Vazquez says.
Meanwhile, Pinero (also known as Manny Stax) is still in jail while Vazquez and friends try and raise the $500,00 cash or $1 million bond needed to get him out on bail. Though he might be safer locked up. Vazquez says she and Pinero have both been threatened since the death of Adames. "I know that they know where I live," she says. "They described it perfectly. If they know he's out on bail they will really be looking for us."
