A Merrillville woman has sued the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, saying she was slammed to the ground and arrested in a June 5, 2023 traffic stop after she told officers she was pregnant.
Shikeia Randolph, now 31, a receptionist with the Gary Housing Authority, suffered a miscarriage three months later at 23 weeks, according to the lawsuit.
“We were excited about the pregnancy,” Randolph, a mother of four, said of her fiance. “There was a lot of emotional trauma. It was overwhelming.”
The lawsuit was filed June 4 in the U.S. District Court in Hammond.
Randolph was charged two months after her arrest in Lake Superior Court in August 2023 with misdemeanor resisting law enforcement. Records show she signed a pretrial diversion agreement in February. If she completes certain requirements, the charge will be dropped.
Her lawyer in the federal case, Matt Custardo, has alleged that the Lake County Sheriff’s Department has not provided the bodycam footage — which could back up his client’s account — to her criminal lawyer Natalie Williams for over a year. He plans to subpoena it himself.
“There needs to be transparency,” he said.
Although he hadn’t met with the Lake County Sheriff’s Department directly, he said that amount of time to provide a video was “atypical.”
The arrest spoke to a broader problem within the department — namely “inadequate training,” “insufficient supervision,” and a failure to hold officers accountable, Custardo wrote in the lawsuit.
Lake County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Pam Jones declined to answer detailed questions in an email, saying they couldn’t comment on pending litigation.
Williams said Friday she didn’t remember the case.
Lawyers said if something like getting bodycam footage was taking a long time, they would generally encourage a client to take a pretrial diversion agreement to get rid of the case, which could be expunged, and move on with his or her life.
Aside from various arrests for driving on a suspended license, Randolph said she had never been in trouble for a violent crime. That morning, she was taking her kids to daycare and stopped briefly at a 24-hour GoLo gas station, 1538 W. Ridge Road in Gary, to pick up milk.
From there, details of what happened — the police account and Randolph’s account diverge.
Her charging documents show Officer Peter Hamady pulled her over sometime after 3:24 a.m. after she got back to her SUV from the gas station, then called for backup. At least two other officers, including J. Bostick, arrived.
Randolph later said via text that they typically left the house at 2 a.m. to drop her fiancé at work in Chicago, before she took her kids to her mother’s house to change before taking them to daycare. Then Randolph headed to work for an early morning shift.
Hamady wrote in an affidavit that when he ran Randolph’s license plate, she had an unspecified “active warrant” from Merrillville town court. She told the Post-Tribune that it was a school truancy warrant from months earlier that she had already gone to court to address.
She said the truancy case happened because she had continually picked her kids up from school in Merrillville about five minutes early. That could not be independently verified.
Court records show Randolph paid a $400 bond just after 9:30 a.m. on June 5, 2023 for the February 2022 truancy case. It was dismissed in December 2023 when the school “reported major improvement,” filings show.
Custardo said he believed the pretext for the stop was also that the ‘Indiana’ was obscured by a license plate cover.
Hamady’s account states that Randolph “became argumentative” when he asked if she could call someone to get the kids. She called her mother. Then, she refused to get out of the vehicle, until her mom came. She clung to the steering wheel until officers were able to pry her out.
There is no mention of her pregnancy or specifically getting slammed to the ground. Hamady writes “while on the ground” officers forced her hands behind her back to arrest her.
Randolph told the Post-Tribune that Hamady wasn’t clear on why he was pulling her over. She didn’t want to get out of her vehicle, because he was aggressive and she didn’t feel safe.
“He never gave me a straight-forward answer,” she said.
At first, he didn’t realize she had her four kids in the vehicle, she alleged. When he first suggested she could step out of her SUV to talk about it, she refused, because she didn’t know what was going on.
She thought it might have been something about a suspended license, but it had been “valid for awhile.”
She tried to call her mom to get the kids. At that point, the officers were “loud,” she said. She rolled up the window to hear what her mom was saying.
At that point, the situation escalated. The officers pulled her out of the vehicle. She was still in her seatbelt.
“Please do not slam me, I’m pregnant,” she recalls telling them.
They slammed her on her stomach, the lawsuit alleges. Officers pinned her down during the arrest.
“When I read the initial discovery, I instantly was kinda furious,” she said. “(Hamady) worded everything (to make) it look like it was from his standpoint.”
Until that point, it was a healthy pregnancy, she said.
The arrest “may have played a role,” Randolph said.
Custardo said they will bring in their own medical experts and any trauma would doubtlessly have had an impact.
There was “no compassion,” he said. They “couldn’t wait for her mother to arrive.” It was “brutal.”
They are asking for a jury trial. There’s no specific dollar figure, but he is expecting to seek a settlement “in the millions.”
Hamady was sworn in as a deputy in December 2022.
A Lake County Sheriff’s Department Facebook post from May 30 stated Hamady was among just over a dozen officers awarded at a recent banquet for exemplary service.
