One mother has come forward saying her son’s case was one of more than 100, which were mishandled inside the Ithaca Police Department.
CNYCentral reports that Ryan Griffin called their newsroom to tell her son’s story, which unfolded in 2017.
“They punched him, they took him to the ground, they stomped him,” Griffin said. Officials in Ithaca confirmed that the investigation into improperly investigated cases involved Christine Barksdale.
She is an investigator for the Ithaca Police Department, and is accused of mishandling 117 cases over a decade.
Griffin tells CNYCentral that she won’t ever forget the ‘beating’ her son suffered in October 2017. She says the lack of support they received from IPD felt like an injustice.
“I just felt like the police department doesn’t care about our pain,” Griffin said. “The police department doesn’t care about these young people who committed a gang assault in Ithaca in broad daylight.”
She says Barksdale made requests over email within a couple days of the incident being brought to her attention. “Everything she asked me for, in a series of emails over a couple of days, we gave her all of what she asked for,” Griffin told CNYCentral, including the names of the people seen beating her son.
After a month of no updates, Barksdale stopped returning Griffin’s calls. Two years later, her questions remain unanswered.
“There was no response,” said Griffin.
Worse yet, it appears IPD had video of the assault. “There are no words as to how I felt watching that video,” Griffin explained. “There are no words as to how I felt that the people who are entrusted with that video footage as evidence that that actually did occur the way that he said it had occurred. There are no words.”
“There are probably a lot of these targets and survivors of these crimes who still have to walk around Ithaca, who still have to face their perpetrators of the crimes,” Griffin added to CNYCentral. “Justice was never served.”
CNYCentral reports that this case in particular has been reassigned.
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