Wendy Kozma was wrapping up her workday with a client when she got a mind-numbing phone call from her mentally impaired daughter: “Mom, this man is trying to take me from Wal-Mart.”
Kozma feared the worst: a kidnapping.
Within minutes, she would learn what was really happening. Her 25-year-old daughter, Jodi, who has the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, was being questioned for shoplifting at a Livonia Wal-Mart. Jodi was suspected of stealing hair ties and hiding them in her waistband and purse during a shopping trip with her grandmother, records show.
Jodi wound up in handcuffs, muscled to the floor by Livonia police.
Wal-Mart and the Livonia police wound up in court.
Turned out, Jodi had bought a 30-pack of hair ties and stickers that day, and has a receipt as proof. The suspicious bulge in her waistband was her cellphone.
In a civil rights lawsuit unfolding in U.S. District Court, Wendy and John Kozma of Novi are suing the retail giant and Livonia police, alleging they used excessive force on their daughter and scarred her emotionally. Jodi grew up learning to trust the cops, her mother said. Now, she’s terrified of them.
“If she were ever lost or stranded, we always taught her to turn and look for police. All of that has been completely destroyed,” Wendy Kozma said in an interview with the Free Press. “I know that this has traumatized her. I want it to go away.”
It has been nearly two years since Jodi was arrested at the Livonia Wal-Mart, but her parents still are reeling. They want an apology from Wal-Mart and Livonia police, who, records show, dispatched four officers to the scene that day “in a SWAT-like approach, parking the cruisers on the sidewalk directly in front of the store doors.”
Among the lawsuit’s claims is that store security and police were repeatedly told by family that Jodi was “special needs,” but failed to treat her accordingly and instead traumatized her when she didn’t have the mental capacity to understand what was going on.
Jodi just wants an apology — and a bouquet of flowers. That’s what apologetic people do in the movies, she told her parents.
The parents want an apology, too, along with unspecified financial damages and assurance that police and store security follow proper procedures when dealing with disabled people.
