No charges to be brought against family that says LPD illegally entered its home

Despite three arrests being made after a now-viral altercation between Lafayette residents and police, none will be charged by the prosecutor's office, one told The Exponent.

William and Taair Neal, 52 and 19 respectively, were accused of resisting law enforcement in May after refusing to allow Lafayette police into their house on the 1900 block of Maple Street. The video, in which officers can be seen busting down the front door and entering the living room, was met with widespread outrage after being spread on Reddit and other social media sites.

Lafayette police confirmed to local media last month the officers did not have a warrant when they entered the home.

William has been outspoken against the six officers he says “trampled on his rights” and “embarrassed us,” speaking for himself, Taair, and Tammy Cooper, William’s girlfriend who officers pulled from the house by her arm, the video shows.

The family has learned charges will not be pursued against anyone in the house by the prosecutor’s office, Cooper said, and nothing involving William or Taair has been filed in online court records.

Lafayette police still considered the case to be active as of June 5, over two weeks after the May 21 arrests, an employee of its records division told The Exponent. The attorney representing the Neals, Kirk Freeman, said he urged the LPD to investigate the officers involved and anticipated that such a review would occur.

One of the officers can be seen on video saying police had seen tape of someone being beaten inside the home.

“Officers had received compelling evidence suggesting a domestic battery and confinement had occurred with persons at the address,” LPD Chief Scott Galloway told local media.

Galloway did not respond to The Exponent’s repeated attempts to contact him.

Neal said officers, many carrying rifles, wavered on their reasons for coming to the house. First, Neal said, he was told the officers were conducting a well-being check. Then they reportedly said they feared Cooper was being held against her will despite her protest to the contrary. Officers also reportedly claimed a 911 call was made from the home, something LPD confirmed was not the case to local media.

Finally, the officers reportedly said they had video evidence that someone inside the home was in danger. But William said the video police referenced is 7-year-old footage of a domestic violence situation that took place in Brownsburg, Indiana, between his other son, Michael, and Michael’s girlfriend, Leslie.

According to William, neither Michael nor Leslie were in the home at the time.

“Not until like 20 minutes after they first got here,” Cooper said, “they said through the intercom, ‘Well, we know that Leslie and Mike is in here, we have video of him beating her, and we need Leslie to come out now so we know she’s safe.’”

“I tell him, ‘Michael don’t live here, and there’s no Leslie here,’” William said.

“They kept insisting that I was Leslie and he was Mike,” Cooper said.

Police logs say a Black woman named Leslie Harris was arrested that night at the same address. Cooper is white.

Freeman said the home in the video police referenced was clearly two stories tall, with stairs visible on film, while William and Cooper’s home does not appear tall enough to hold anything but an attic from the outside and has no stairs.

“This may be the case that breaks the dam,” Freeman said. “All this ongoing criminal enterprise bullshit that LPD’s been pulling for years may come crashing down on their head, and they are pissing their pants.”

‘The case that breaks the dam’

Multiple neighbors around the Neals’ home told The Exponent the area was “typically quiet.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity so their comments would be unknown to the Neals, they said they had not seen police at the Neals’ house before, and most said they would not have expected police to show up any night.

Some neighbors said they were woken by the commotion at various times after 11 p.m. Police logs show the arrests took place at 11:14 p.m. None reported significant noise before that time.

Because Lafayette police still consider the incident an open case, The Exponent was unable to access bodycam footage, police reports or records from the incident to verify the night’s events.

Freeman said his clients found the phone Taair used to film the altercation on 18th Street, which runs between Columbia Street, where Lafayette police headquarters is located, and Greenbush Street, which is about 800 feet from the Neals’ home.

“Either the phone shot out of a police cruiser like it was a Transformer or it was chucked out a window,” Freeman said.

“It’s clear that what happened here was an outrage,” he said at a June 3 Lafayette City Council meeting. “We urge the city council to use its administrative oversight over the Lafayette police to ensure that this does not happen again. Furthermore, the Neals would urge that those officers be terminated and not be allowed to work as law enforcement officers anywhere else in the state of Indiana.”