CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (CN) – As the lawsuit tells it, a teenage girl identified as K.G.J. watched from the car as the sheriff’s deputy searched her lifelong friend in a cold April rain, groping and fondling the teen. On her face was a look of terror.
“He’s not supposed to do this, is he?” the 16-year-old named A.O.K. in the complaint filed Monday asked K.G.J.
No, replied K.G.J. But the deputy, Daniel Cameron Wilkey, interjected.
“Shut the fuck up,” he allegedly said. “You don’t know your rights.”
Six teenagers including K.G.J. had been riding in a vehicle on April 18 when they were pulled over by two deputies with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office on the grounds that the factory-installed windows violated Tennessee’s laws regarding window tints.
Wilkey, 5-foot-8 with hazel eyes, claimed he smelled weed and started searching the teens.
The other deputy, Tyler McRae, prevented the teen from calling their parents and ordered them to face forward and keep their hands on their laps, according to the complaint filed in Hamilton County Circuit Court.
Watching the deputy touch her friend and waiting to be searched, K.G.J. claims she thought the men that stopped them were sex traffickers dressed up as cops.
Eventually, the deputies arrested the 16-year-old driver of the vehicle and let one teen boy walk away from the traffic stop. But before leaving the remaining teenage girls, Wilkey told them he was a preacher, the complaint states.
“You kids are going to hell,” he allegedly said.
Eight months later, on Friday morning, Wilkey, 26, sat in the second row of a crowded Hamilton County courtroom in downtown Chattanooga wearing a grey suit, grey and dark-red tie to hear a 44-count indictment on charges that range from reckless driving to stalking to sexual battery and rape.
None of the 44 counts have to do with the traffic stop in April, although the five teenage girls represented by Chattanooga civil rights attorney Robin Flores told a federal magistrate judge this week he is setting up interviews between his clients and state and county investigators.
Wilkey got up from where he was sitting next to two women to stand next to attorney Ben McGowan, who asked Criminal Court Judge Barry Steelman to postpone his arraignment until Jan. 24 so Wilkey can officially hire McGowan as his counsel in the case. The judge agreed.
Wilkey, followed by fellow officers in uniform, left the courtroom and got into an elevator. With that, he ended his first appearance in court.
In the last two months, Wilkey and Hamilton County, where he has worked for two years as a sheriff deputy, has been named in nine civil lawsuits. In early October, one complaint alleged he performed an illegal cavity search on a handcuffed man. Another civil suit filed around the same time claims Wilkey told a woman on whom he found a small amount of marijuana he would only issue her a criminal citation if she allowed him to baptize her.
In a press conference Monday, Dr. Elnora Woods, president of the Chattanooga chapter of the NAACP, described the allegation that Wilkey felt that God told him to baptize the woman as “satanic practices.”
Follow @jcksndnl
