Nationwide — I was traveling while black and chasing the next cheap ticket when I landed in Breonna Taylor’s Kentucky. Prior to my travels, I had posted a YouTube video titled with the figure of speech “I am the Bomb” which was an outreach video to homeless airport “bums.” I had already purchased a departure ticket and had been sitting to eat breakfast when white airport police officers at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali Airport approached me and said, you’re Trinidadian and I saw your video “I am the Bomb “and he showed me his Louisville Metro Police Department badge. I responded vocally, “Everyone knows a “bum” is a homeless person.” One of the white airport police officers told me to go with those men. I felt afraid that those men would gang up on me and rap me. In total, it was four of them, four white male airport police officers.
They even had the canine sniff me and I dropped my belongings on the floor to show that I had no dangerous items. The officers then wrote lies on the police report saying I had made a bomb threat at the airport and that I resisted arrest and that my conduct was disorderly and also charged me with terroristic threatening in the third degree. They were arresting me without probable cause and for protected free speech and lying on a police report. The judge then set the bail amount to 250,000 and then to 25,000 and I have no criminal record. The judge was always preferential to the prosecutor. My Asian public defender did not represent my interest but the interest of the white airport police, the judge, and that of the prosecutor, so he got a court order granted for me to do a mental status exam.
My civil rights and civil liberties were violated. I had done nothing wrong. I was actually trafficked by false police reports and court orders easily granted because of networking. In this case, the white airport police and the judge were also criminalizing mental illness because I had disclosed by Facebook post that I was suicidal at the airport. I obviously wasn’t serious about being suicidal I only said this to keep a White man who said he would report me as a public threat from doing my life harm.
FBI Louisville was also involved, and it was them who forwarded my information to the airport police at Muhammad Ali Airport in Louisville Kentucky. FBI is known to lack real counterterrorism intelligence and to set suspected up to be terrorists so as to wrongfully prosecute them. At the jail, I was denied phone access and couldn’t even hire my own legal counsel for up to a year. I had been sent to a mental health hospital and an order to forcefully inject me with psych meds was granted all because I did a protected free speech YouTube video that was outreach to homeless persons at airports known as “bums.”
My career prospects were attacked. I had diligently worked for 6 years on becoming an Army Chaplain and had also founded a nonprofit organization to attack the social problem of child abuse in a poverty-stricken section of Brooklyn. I had earned an MSW at Long Island University in Brooklyn and had self-authored books. I also have a bachelor’s in psychology. I had been discharged to homelessness. I was forced to accept a plea deal for a crime I never committed. I decided to apply to law school since no one would take my case. I especially love freedom of information law, social media law, nonprofit law, cyber security law, and risk management.
Makeda Charles, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, is a 34-year-old MSW social worker, a writer, and the author of The Supernatural Power of Desire and Content With Who I Am and Black Hair Luck: You’re Fortune to Have Black Hair. Based in New York City, she is a creative and a non-profit founder.
For press inquiries or media interviews, contact makedacharles.11203@gmail.com
