A&E 'Rookies' cop goes wild
A New Orleans-area mom said she was shackled, beaten and tasered by sheriff’s deputies while picking up her teen daughter from a party last year, and now she’s suing the deputies and the sheriff.
Madelyn Zuppardo, 42, of Metairie, claimed in the suit that both she and her daughter, Sabrina, now 17, were brutalized by a pair of thuggish cops at an apartment in Jefferson Parish last May.
According to the suit, Sabrina was partying with pals at 24-year-old Frank Palermo’s apartment on May 14, 2011, when police arrived to investigate complaints about noise and underage drinking.
Glenn McGovern, Zuppardo’s lawyer, said trouble started when Palermo said he wanted a lawyer.
Cops cuffed Palermo and chained him to a friend, Tiffany McBrier, now 21, according to police and McBrier.
Police said Palermo resisted, so Deputy Frank Caracci tasered him.
The jolt send shock waves up McBrier’s arm, she told local station WWL-TV.
"It was just like a stinging in my arm, as soon as they hit him with it, I felt it," she told the station.
Chilling video shot by a camera inside Carraci’s X-26 Taser showed Palermo lying motionless getting shocked, while McBrier and others in the room scream for mercy.
“Please stop!” a woman pleads.
“Stop resisting!” Carraci says.
Zuppardo, a cab driver, said her daughter called her in a panic and said people were being tasered.
While on the phone, Zuppardo said she heard cops calling her daughter a “little whore” and “sweet cheeks,” according to the Times-Picayune newspaper.
When she arrived, her daughter was in cuffs.
Cops said they found a marijuana pipe in Sabrina’s purse.
Zuppardo told Sabrina to stay quiet and told the deputies she was going to call Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand the next day, her lawyer said.
That’s when she said she was cuffed, kicked and then shocked with a Taser and a stun gun.
“(Caracci) hit her in the buttocks with two darts and then hit her in the back with two darts,” McGovern told the Daily News.
Zuppardo was arrested and charged with resisting arrest, interfering with police and battery on Caracci.
She was convicted on the first two counts on Tuesday and sentenced to one year probation and community service.
Zuppardo is suing Caracci, Normand and Deputy Sean Williams, who she said also shocked her, claiming that she suffered burns on her breasts and legs.
Sabrina, who said police hit her and gave her a black eye, was also named as a plaintiff.
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s department has not commented on the case.
Caracci, who appeared on the A&E police reality show “Rookies,” has since resigned from the department.
Over the past few years, he was plagued by complaints of thuggish behavior, the Times-Picayune reported.
In one of those incidents, he was accused of tasing a man to death during a traffic stop in 2004. The case was settled out of court in 2007.