The Guardian has been relentlessly pursuing a story out of Chicago—the subject of Homan Square, an alleged PD "black site" where suspects are reportedly taken to be brutally interrogated. Now a 13th man has shared with the paper his own allegations of abuse at the hands of officers there. Former detainees at Homan (mostly minority men, per the newspaper) have alleged they were barred from seeing a lawyer, kept without charges being pressed, brutally interrogated, and sometimes physically or sexually abused. Angel Perez is the latest man to level these accusations, telling the Guardian he was taken to Homan in October 2012 after being stopped by cops who wanted him to touch base with a drug dealer they believed he knew. What Perez says happened after he declined:
Per Perez, the cops shackled him, taunted him, and began running a metal object (Perez says officers implied it was a gun) along his skin—and then forced it into his rectum. "He jammed it in there and I started jerking and going all crazy. … [I] go into a full-blown panic attack," he tells the Guardian. "The damage it caused, it pretty much swole my rear end like a baboon's butt." Perez says he then gave in to the cops' request and set up a $170 heroin buy. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has insisted "we follow all the rules," and the PD in March put out a "fact sheet" about the Homan facility. Sample line: "The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with suspects is unequivocally false, it is offensive, and it is not supported by any facts whatsoever." (Read the Guardian's coverage here, here, here, and here.)
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