A now-retired Black Secret Service Agent sued the United States Park Service after he was twice detained while on duty nearly eight years ago.
Former Special Agent Nathaniel Hicks was awarded $730,000 in damages by a jury in 2021, and now a federal appeals court has upheld the award.
Hicks was detained twice on July 11, 2015, by officers Brian Phillip and Gerald Ferreyra for more than an hour. The former agent was first detained by Ferreyra as he sat in his vehicle before dawn on the shoulder of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway waiting to lead a motorcade to protect the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Ferreyra saw Hicks on the shoulder of the highway seated in his unmarked vehicle and claimed he wanted to perform a “welfare check.” Ferreyra claimed he noticed Hicks’ gun in its holster on the passenger seat and drew his weapon, yelling, “Don’t touch the gun.”
Hicks, who has said he heard a tap on his passenger window and looked up to see a gun pointed at him, unrolled his window while following Ferreyra’s directions and immediately identified himself as a U.S. Secret Service officer. Hicks also showed him his identification. As Ferreyra took Hicks’ gun, Hicks maintained that Ferreyra continued yelling and “telling him to shut the ‘f’ up.”
“Ferreyra continued to appear ‘very agitated to the point of . . . spitting at the mouth while he was shaking profusely with the handgun pointed in [Hicks’s] direction.’ At this point, Officer Ferreyra removed Hicks’s weapon from the car and returned to his patrol vehicle,” read the lawsuit documents.
“I said, ‘Whoa, whoa. I’m a Secret Service special agent,’” Hicks testified in a deposition.
“I felt completely helpless that here I was, an African-American male that was surrounded by all Caucasian officers [Ferreyra is Hispanic],” added Hicks at the civil trial. “I just felt very disgusted at the time and just very upset and…
Read the full article here
