A random act of violence left 20-year-old New Yorker Chad Seegars with a vicious gash running across his right cheek. But the trauma was only amplified after the attack, when a corrections officer uploaded a photo of the wound to Facebook for hundreds of strangers to gawk at, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.
Seegars was in the jail’s visitor’s center on Feb. 10, 2012, when he was grabbed from behind and slashed. The cut left a gaping, eight-inch gash running from his lower right jaw past his eye and required 90 stitches to be closed up–but not before an unnamed corrections officer snapped a photograph.
“The Things That Happens On The Island Smhh [shaking my head hard]” the officer wrote as a caption on Facebook.
Seegars’ mother was horrified. She told the New York Daily News: “I was devastated. My son’s face was split open like a pear.”
Now Seegars is suing New York City, its Department of Correction, and the officer for an undisclosed amount, claiming the photograph humiliated him. The city and the Department of Correction are keeping mum about the case.
Photo via the New York Daily News
