Store owner where Alton Sterling shot sues Baton Rouge police

BATON ROUGE, La., July 12 (UPI) -- The owner of the convenience store where police fatally shot Alton Sterling filed a lawsuit suit against the Baton Rouge Police Department on Monday.

Also, the first police account of the events leading up to the shooting last week emerged in an affidavit for a search warrant of the surveillance security system at Triple S Food Mart that recorded the incident.

Owner Abdullah Muflahi alleges in his lawsuit that he was unlawfully detained and that police illegally confiscated his cellphone and the store's entire security system, which recorded the killing of Sterling, whom Muflahi allowed to sell CDs and DVDs outside his shop for several years.

"He was illegally detained in the back of a locked hot police car for four to five hours," Joel Porter, Muflahi's attorney, told WWL TV.

Porter said police then drove Muflahi to the Louisiana State Police headquarters early July 5 and illegally detained him for two more hours while detectives questioned him.

Porter said his client told officers to get out of his store following the shooting of Sterling. The officers said they would return with a warrant, but Porter claims that was after they took the surveillance footage.

"If the security system is concealed then how did Baton Rouge Police Department get the make, model, the name of the security system but for the fact that they did an illegal search before they obtained the warrant," Porter told WWL.

The defendants are the city-parish government, Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr. and officers Timothy Ballard and Robert Cook. Also named: Howie Lake II and Blane Salamoni, the two policemen involved in the fatal confrontation with Sterling.

A Baton Rouge police spokesman said the agency couldn't comment on the litigation.

The police had been called after a complaint of a black man who had threatened someone with a gun outside the store, according to the affidavit for a search warrant for the video equipment obtained Monday by media outlets.

Sterling was "fitting the description of the person with the gun," the affidavit reads.

The officers told Sterling to put his hands on the car's hood but he didn't comply with the commands or the officers' attempt to restrain him, the document says. The officers "deployed their BRPD issued tasers."

According to the affidavit, "while the officers were attempting to subdue" Sterling, they "observed the butt of a gun in the subject's front pants pocket."

"When the subject attempted to reach for the gun from his pocket the officers fired their police issued duty weapon at the subject to stop the threat," the document reads.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar C. Moore III announced Monday he would recuse himself from the case because he has a personal relationship with the parents of one of the involved police officers.