Yesterday, video of a friendly little rat frolicking inside a subway car won New Yorkers' hearts. But beware: not all rats are lovable little scamps. Some of them have been known to feast on babies, while others prefer penis. A Long Island man who woke up in jail to find a rat gnawing on his genitals is suing Nassau County for "failing to adequately protect him from rodents" when he was jailed at the Nassau County Correctional Center in 2007 on a charge of menacing his wife. It seems Peter Solomon was barely behind bars a week before some rat tried to make him its bitch.
Solomon, a Vietnam veteran PTSD, had been transferred to the facility's mental observation unit, where he was sleeping in his cell one night when a rat emerged from inside the mattress and bit his penis. He was treated and given rabies shots at a nearby hospital, but "there was no significant blood loss and the wound did not require stitching," according to a recent decision [pdf] by Eastern District Judge Arthur D. Spatt, who is allowing Solomon's lawsuit to proceed. As a result of the rat bite, Solomon's lawyer says his client suffers "complete sexual dysfunction," and has had to undergo "numerous painful and humiliating" medical procedures.
Lawyers for Nassau County wanted Judge Spatt to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that Solomon could not prove the prison had a rodent problem, New York Law Journal (paywall) reports. But Solomon's lawyers gathered numerous first-hand accounts of rat and mouse encounters from inmates at the jail, including one inmate's discovery of "a rodent part" in another inmate's meal. ("You gonna eat that?") One of Solomon's lawyers tells the Long Island Press, “The county is in trouble. There was a long-standing practice and pattern of not taking complaints about rodents seriously. I guess because they are inmates."
