City faces trial against NOPD officer who sexually assaulted teenager | Courts

On Tuesday, the sobs of a young woman filled a federal courtroom as she recalled four cases from 2020 in which she was sexually abused as a teenager by Rodney Vicknair, then a New Orleans police officer.

How Vicknair managed to stay on the streets during the last of these attacks, despite warning signs and a warning to police leadership a few days earlier, is the focus of a civil rights trial in which several high-ranking New Orleans police officers, former and current, also testified on Tuesday.

Among them was NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick, who testified as an expert on police hiring. Kirkpatrick said she would never have hired Vicknair because he was arrested two years before he started his job in 2007.

Vicknair was the officer who raised the case 13 years later, when the plaintiff was 14 and reported a rape. The now 19-year-old tearfully testified that Vicknair calmed her down and convinced her to get a rape screening at Children's Hospital.

Vicknair stayed in touch, she said, and maintained a friendly relationship with him. Later that year, he sexually assaulted her twice in her home, she said, including grabbing her breasts in her bedroom.

Then, on September 23, 2020, Vicknair came to her home, called her to his truck, locked the doors, leaned over, and touched her genitals under her clothing without her consent. At the time, she was 15 and Vicknair was over 50.

This incident occurred just days after she spoke with an internal police investigator and five days after police leadership was first notified of a potentially predatory cop in New Orleans. The girl's caregiver told a supervisor, who called the city's independent police overseer.

The Washington Post reported that the NOPD hired Vicknair despite his past, which included multiple arrests and a conviction for assault on a juvenile.

In her lawsuit, the woman blames the NOPD for hiring Vicknair and assigning him her case because of his long history of disciplinary problems and complaints of unprofessional conduct. On Tuesday, her lawyers also examined why police did not detain him sooner.

Vicknair was arrested three days after attacking the victim in his truck. He pleaded guilty to violating her rights, was sentenced to 14 years in prison, and died in prison on New Year's Day.

A jury of six women and two men will hear the question this week of whether the city should pay. The Times-Picayune is not naming the woman, who married last year and described Vicknair's crimes as a heavy burden. She said he made her lose interest in sex.

“It's just not something I like anymore,” she said, adding that becoming a parent was also unattractive.

“The way it is today is that you tell your children that if you are in danger and need help, you should go to a police officer or something like that,” she said. “I don't want to be the one telling that to my child and feeling terrible about something a police officer does to my child.”

“Restraint from above”

The case revolves in part around what happened after the Office of the Independent Police Watchdog, then headed by Susan Hutson, now the sheriff of Orleans Parish, alerted then-Deputy Police Chief Arlinda Westbrook, who headed the NOPD's internal affairs division, the Public Integrity Bureau, for a decade.

Stella Cziment, the former deputy independent police inspector who now heads that office, testified that she and Hutson rushed to contact Westbrook and then-Superintendent Shaun Ferguson on Sept. 18, 2022, five days before the sexual assault in the truck. A meeting was arranged for the following Monday, where an internal investigator, Lt. Lawrence Jones, interviewed the victim and quickly identified Vicknair as the suspect officer.

Cziment said she expected Vicknair to be arrested quickly given the evidence, which included sexually charged messages and photos, but she was disappointed that he remained at large for days before his arrest the following Saturday.

“This is not two teenagers texting. This is an adult police officer, an adult human being, having contact with a child,” Cziment testified. “I was very concerned about a possible pattern of behavior or possible access by this officer to other children … and all the other red flags that this could raise for the department.”

Cziment said she “felt reluctance from above, but I noticed quick reactions from the levels that were actually handling the case.”

However, Westbrook had previously stated that she had followed investigator Jones's tip. Westbrook said that at the time there was not enough evidence to arrest Vicknair.

“When we had reasonable suspicion, we took these steps,” she said.

The city argued that it was not liable for the crimes Vicknair admitted to.

Ferguson to testify

In March, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, nominated by President Bill Clinton, agreed to delay the trial after the victim's lawyers cited new evidence in a 2020 text exchange involving Westbrook and former New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Shaun Ferguson.

Ferguson is scheduled to testify as the last witness in the case on Wednesday morning.

Kirkpatrick, Ferguson's successor as NOPD chief, testified Tuesday in her white dress uniform, though she said she was not doing so as NOPD chief. Although Vicknair's 2005 arrests for aggravated assault and simple assault were later dropped, Kirkpatrick said she would not have hired him anyway.

“I can understand that someone else would do that, but not to me,” she said.

Among those in the courtroom Tuesday was U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, who presided over the 2012 federal settlement that governed the NOPD reforms.