BATON ROUGE, La. (Legal Newsline) – A Louisiana federal judge is allowing a lawsuit filed against Port Allen and two of its police officers over a shooting death to proceed.
On June 13, Judge John deGravelles denied a motion for judgment on the pleadings filed by Port Allen and officers Briant Landry and Tiffeny Robertson Wycoskie. The two are accused of both shooting Fatrell Queen and covering up their actions.
Tara Snearl, Fatrell’s mother, and Ayanna Queen Tran, his child, sued in 2018 for survival and wrongful death based on battery or negligent killing, intentional infliction of emotional distress and fraud.
According to the complaint, Queen was shot by an unknown assailant on Nov. 2, 2017, while at home. Allegedly moments later, officer from the Port Allen Police Department and the West Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office arrived on scene and swept the location and shot Queen a second time, killing him.
Snearl alleges that officers then proceed to cover up their role in Queen's death by a series of unusual actions and explanations.
An amended petition alleges officers:
-Claimed they didn’t find Queen’s body during a sweep of the house despite bullet holes and body-cam footage showing otherwise;
-Cancelled a previous request for an ambulance at the crime scene;
-Claimed not to find Queen’s body for two hours;
-Failed to contact the West Baton Rouge Coroner’s office for 4.5 hours after Queen was killed;
-Towed his car without a believable justification;
-Selectively collected ballistics evidence from the scene while leaving behind others;
-Made a 911 call with the instruction “Don’t tell her”; and
-Had Wycoskie’s husband use power tools to extract bullet casings from Queen’s closet;
“(T)he Court can easily infer from the above facts, accepted as true and construed in a light most favorable to Plaintiffs, that Landry and Wycoski killed Queen and then suppressed the truth about that murder through acts and silence… with the specific intent to defraud Plaintiffs (and indeed, the community) to escape liability, which Plaintiffs were then forced to rely upon, and which caused them significant emotional distress,” the judge wrote.
“Further, the Court can easily infer from such circumstantial evidence of coordinated conduct an agreement to accomplish this fraud, which, again, was actually committed and which in fact caused Plaintiffs significant injuries.”