It's one of those Catholic pope shitting in the woods as a tree falls down questions: If the Lipstick Bounty Hunters jumped bail, could they haul themselves in?
Actually, the bounty hunters whose pink Lipstick Bail Bonds vehicles with large lips graphics you see all over north Long Beach are not dealing with a criminal complaint but yet another civil lawsuit alleging they unjustly roughed someone up.
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We told you in April about the suit brought by a 35-year-old man who claims members of the Lakewood-based Lipstickers left him blind in one eye while videotaping his capture in Huntington Beach for a presumed reality show.
Daniel Lee Duvall Claims Lipstick Bounty Hunters Blinded His Eye
Now it's a Hawthorne woman who is suing because Lipstickers allegedly kicked in the door of her apartment earlier this year while looking for her fugitive former boyfriend, assaulting her and spooking the dickens out of her 7-year-old daughter.
Shavonna Sutton, 25, filed the lawsuit Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of herself and her daughter Jayla Smith, against Lipstick Bounty Hunters, the city of Hawthorne and several other defendants, reports City News Service. The suit alleges civil rights violations, assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence. Unspecified compensatory and punitive damages are being sought.
The bounty hunters burst through the front door of Sutton's apartment just after midnight April 20 looking for Ricky Lewis, with whom the woman claims she had not spoken to in more than two years. Court papers indicate Lipstick Bounty Hunters Roni Alicia Faciane, Lisa Golt, Theresa Golt and male bounty hunter Chris Alvarez were “armed with pink guns and video cameras” when they entered the unit.
Sutton's suit claims her answers that she had no knowledge of Lewis' whereabouts were met with arrogant, demeaning insults and physical violence, with Faciane allegedly telling her, “No nigger is worth that shit.” Jayla was also questioned, according to the complaint.
Faciane told City News Service the lawsuit is “frivolous” and “malicious,” blaming the kicked-in door on Alvarez while maintaining she and the other women were merely backing him up. She added the bounty hunters had information Lewis had been in the apartment and did everything they could to persuade Sutton to come out and keep her daughter from being traumatized.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.