When Brianna’s uncle died in 2024, she stumbled onto a collection of papers that took her 20 years back in time, back to when she was a frightened 12-year-old girl sitting in Baltimore’s social services office.
The documents showed her uncle’s prolonged effort to get justice for Brianna after he learned what happened to her in that office in 2004. Reading through handwritten letters and statements from that time, Brianna found herself back in that room, where a Baltimore Police officer groped and sexually abused her, she said in an interview with Baltimore Beat.
Her uncle never got what she would consider justice. But under Maryland’s Child Victims Act, Brianna got her own chance: she filed a lawsuit against the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore over the abuse. (Baltimore Beat is identifying Brianna using a pseudonym to protect her identity and safety.)
“I feel like I was robbed of a childhood,” she said.
Brianna’s lawsuit became possible in 2023, when Maryland lawmakers passed legislation to allow adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse to sue no matter how long ago their abuse happened. While the Child Victims Act was passed after a massive attorney general’s report revealed decades of sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, it also brought forward thousands of other lawsuits, many against the state’s juvenile justice system.
A small subset of these cases has received less attention: lawsuits over abuse at the hands of the police.
Half a dozen of these lawsuits were consolidated into a group in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. While they are far fewer in number than the lawsuits against Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services, they depict violent rapes and abuse by officers who had vulnerable children under their control. The allegations span decades; one survivor is in her 70s now.
“If you look at the date ranges of these cases, … there is a clear history of sexual misconduct committed by Baltimore City Police Officers against, typically, women, young women in their custody,” said Cary Hansel, a civil rights lawyer handling one of the lawsuits. “Given that clear history, there is an obligation on the part of anyone with power to stop it.”
The Maryland attorney general’s office, which defends state agencies in these lawsuits, declined to comment. A spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Scott also declined to comment on behalf of the city.
In court papers, both the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland denied responsibility for the allegations. The city and the state offered something of a catch-22 in their responses: the city argued the Baltimore Police Department was under state control at the time of the claims, while the state argued that BPD officers were city employees at that time.
They also claimed to be protected by sovereign immunity, or the idea that federal and state governments have immunity from lawsuits unless they specifically waive it.
Those arguments recently succeeded in court. Baltimore City Circuit Judge Audrey J. S. Carrion dismissed nearly all of the claims in the consolidated police cases on June 23, finding that the assertions against the city were invalid because BPD was a state entity at the time of the alleged abuse, and that the state of Maryland is shielded because Baltimore police officers were not considered state employees. Carrion also found that the Child Victims Act did not waive the Baltimore Police Department’s immunity from being sued.
Claims against individual police officers can proceed, but the plaintiffs are also considering appealing Carrion’s dismissal. Brianna’s lawsuit, which is in a separate group of cases, was not dismissed.
The case Hansel is leading is one of the more straightforward ones — and partly survived the judge’s dismissal — because the officer named in the lawsuit faced criminal charges and was convicted of misconduct in office in 2008.
According to the lawsuit, Officer William D. Welch raped a 16-year-old girl in July 2006, when she was being held at a Baltimore Police district waiting for county police officers to pick her up on an outstanding warrant. The girl, now an adult and the plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that Welch found a small bag of marijuana in her purse and said she could avoid criminal charges if she performed oral sex on him. He allowed her to flush the marijuana, according to the lawsuit, and then took her back to an interview room and raped her.
The girl reported the abuse (and that there was $200 missing from her purse) to Baltimore County law enforcement once she was in their custody. An investigation found Welch’s DNA on wet wipes he used to clean himself after the assault, and he was indicted on second-degree rape and other charges.
In a 2008 article about his conviction, The Baltimore Sun wrote that Welch was “accused of having sex with a 16-year-old girl.” Welch agreed to an Alford plea, in which he did not admit guilt but acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him, and received a suspended sentence for misconduct in office, the Sun wrote. He avoided any time in jail and was allowed to resign from the department, rather than being fired. The Beat could not reach Welch for comment after trying multiple phone numbers listed in a public records database.
“He was paid by BPD and remained an employee for a year and a half after this happened,” Hansel said.
Other Child Victims Act lawsuits against the police may be harder to prove because of the passage of time. Some survivors don’t know the names of the officers they say abused them. In one case, the survivor says he was 16 years old and had just gotten beaten up by a group of people when a police officer forced him to perform oral sex in September 1988. The boy had a head injury and could not read; he later tried to commit suicide in the city jail, according to his lawsuit.
Nearly all of the survivors’ names are shielded in the lawsuits. One woman, identified in her lawsuit as Jane Doe, alleges that a city police officer picked her up on her way to school when she was around 16, in 1995. The officer brought her back to a police precinct and told her he believed she was a prostitute, according to the lawsuit. Then he asked her, “What would you do to go home?” He proceeded to rape her, the lawsuit alleges.
In 2004, life was already difficult for Brianna. She and her brother were removed from their home because of physical abuse and neglect, she told the Beat in an interview.
While her brother was being evaluated for injuries at a hospital, a police officer who was present made suggestive comments about Brianna’s looks, she said. She tried to tell another policeman, but he told her to “quit playing” instead of acting on her concerns, she said. When she and her brother were transported in a patrol car, she recalled, the officer who’d made the comments groped her.
When they arrived at the social services office near Penn Station, the two children sat alone for a long time in what seemed to be a storage room, full of boxes and cribs and other supplies, Brianna recalled. Then the same officer from earlier showed up by himself.
“I felt like maybe we were about to be taken to a new home or something like that,” she said. “I wasn’t sure why he came back because, you know, I was just a kid.”
He locked the door to the room, trapping both kids inside. According to Brianna’s lawsuit in Baltimore City Circuit Court, the officer then fondled her, forcibly performed oral sex on her, and rubbed his penis against her body.
When staffers at the social services office knocked on the door to the storage room, the officer told Brianna to hide behind some boxes and made up a reason why the door was locked, according to her lawsuit.
After that day, Brianna moved into a foster home. But her run-ins with the officer weren’t over, according to her lawsuit. The same officer came to visit her foster home, causing her to act out. When she was moved into a group home, she began receiving flowers signed with the officer’s initials. He also called the group home and tried to speak with Brianna so often that staff blocked his phone number, according to the lawsuit.
The Beat agreed not to publish the officer’s name, though he is identified in Brianna’s lawsuit, because she fears he will resume stalking her even now. The officer is not a defendant in the lawsuit, so he has not been served with legal papers.
The Beat confirmed he was employed by the Baltimore Police Department and reviewed a document, provided by Brianna, that showed the department suspended the officer’s police powers in 2005. He resigned from the department in 2008, BPD confirmed.
Brianna spent the rest of her childhood in various placements, where she says she was subjected to more physical and sexual abuse and medicated into a stupor. Her lawsuit also names the Maryland Department of Human Services, which oversees the state’s foster care system.
Even as an adult, she worried the police officer would come after her again, and searched online to see if he was still alive. She responded aggressively when she encountered men, which got her into trouble, she said. For years, she refused to call the police at all if she needed help.
Now, Brianna finally has a job that offers her the flexibility to deal with her ongoing mental health problems. And armed with her uncle’s papers, she’s ready to continue fighting for accountability.
“I really do want justice,” she said. “My life could have been totally different if I would have had appropriate help.”
Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance reporter in Baltimore.