LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) — What was supposed to be a trip through the drive-thru after work turned into a nightmare for Danny Brooks.
The Illinois man, who was in Lafayette for work, was pulled over at gunpoint, cuffed and held in a police cruiser because officers thought his truck was stolen.
Body camera footage obtained exclusively by News 18 shows the officers were wrong.
The footage shows a tense scene outside the Lafayette Chik-Fil-A in December, as officers with guns drawn stop the driver of what they believe is a stolen truck.
Officer Ryan Haag stops the truck and orders the driver out, while Officer William Snider places him in cuffs.
"Step out of the car and keep your hands up," Haag tells Brooks. "Keep your hands above your head. Face away from me."
"I'm going to put you in cuffs for a second," Snider says.
"I think you've got the wrong person," Brooks replies.
In fact, Danny Brooks was a contractor for General Electric going through the drive-thru after work.
"This plate comes back as stolen," Snider adds.
"That can't be," Brooks says. "It's my company vehicle."
So what went wrong?
Brooks' plate was identical to the one on a stolen car out of Illinois, except for a "C" signifying a commercial vehicle.
Brooks realizes the mistake before officers do, as he talks to Snider from the back of a squad car.
"You have to run the 'C' on my license plate, too," he says. "Illinois has a 'C,' and if you don't run the 'C' on it..."
"Yep," Snider replies before Brooks finishes his sentence. "I've had this issue with their plates before."
LPD Flock surveillance cameras and officers didn't initially notice the "C."
They also didn't realize the stolen car's plate returned to a Chevrolet Impala, not a pickup truck.
"The plate they issued on this truck is the exact same plate, and then 'C-Charles' for 'commercial,'" Haag tells other officers.
Now, Brooks is suing Lafayette Police Department.
He wasn't available for comment but News 18 interviewed his lawyers.
"They could have typed in my client's license plate and ran it manually in the squad car, like they're required to do through LPD policy," says Dylan Mroczek, an attorney at the Kirk Freeman Law Office. "They didn't do that. They showed up, they pulled guns on my client, they removed him from the vehicle, put him in the back of a squad car."
Brooks was eventually removed from a squad car and uncuffed when officers realized their mistake.
"He's got PTSD. He's a former combat veteran in the Air Force and also a former police officer himself," Mroczek says. "Things could have got really out of hand, but my client was, I guess, as poised as you could possibly be in that situation, and it served him well in that situation."
A spokesperson for LPD says none of the officers received disciplinary action but the department was provided additional training on using Flock cameras.
LPD declined to comment further, citing the pending legal action.
Watch News 18 at 6 for a full breakdown of the body camera footage.
