“Well, good luck on Saturday.”These were the five words Sean Salvati cheekily uttered to two RCMP officers on June 23, 2010, three days before the G20 summit. And with that one sentence, what had been a fun evening of friends and Blue Jays baseball quickly became a hellish 11-hour ordeal in which Salvati claims he was arrested, strip-searched, beaten, denied access to a lawyer and left naked in a cell for nearly an hour.
Scenes of Salvati’s ordeal were captured by police security cameras at a downtown police station and his lawyers have obtained several hours of footage through Freedom of Information requests.
In one video, Salvati is shown being led from an interrogation room by three officers and escorted naked past a female officer.
Salvati also alleges he was beaten while officers forcibly strip-searched him.
“One of the officers grabbed the neck and began punching me,” Salvati said in an interview with the Star Thursday. “(He) mentioned something about ‘These are your rights.’ You know? Like: ‘You think you have rights? These are your rights.’
“And I just started screaming.”
Salvati, a 33-year-old licensed paralegal, claims he was an innocent victim caught up in the G20’s overzealous security effort. The charge that allegedly got him thrown in jail — Salvati was pulled from a cab and arrested for public intoxication — was never filed in court.
He is suing the Toronto Police Services Board, the attorney general of Canada and four Toronto police officers for false arrest and imprisonment.
The lawsuit was filed in Ontario Superior Court late Thursday afternoon and seeks at least $75,000 in damages. Salvati further alleges police assaulted him in custody and violated his Charter rights by denying him access to a lawyer and subjecting him to cruel and unusual treatment when they locked him naked in a cell for 48 minutes.
Salvati’s allegations have not yet been proven in court and no statements of defence have been filed.
“You just never imagine when you go about your daily life that this is the kind of thing that could happen to you when you’ve done nothing wrong,” said lawyer Paul Quick, who is representing Salvati along with Murray Klippenstein. “And Sean hasn’t done anything wrong.”
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Source: Toronto Star
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