GARY—Police looking for suspects in a mid-morning home invasion Tuesday saw two men who immediately began to run from them
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Officers chased the pair and located them in the basement of burned-out, vacant home in the 500 block of West 22nd Place.
Darion Cousins, 22, and Daidreon Sparks, 18, both appeared Wednesday in Gary City Court.
“We were both under the influence of being scared,” Cousins told Judge Deidre Monroe, as he pleaded not guilty to criminal trespass.
Sparks pleaded guilty, but he had much more to say.
“On the behalf of what happened was, I got approached by officers,” he said. “I was, I guess, racial profiled and heavily beaten.”
Monroe challenged him.
“The city is about 75 percent black, how are you racially profiled?” Monroe asked. “Why did you run?”
Sparks said he was scared. Despite his claims of a police beating, Sparks had no visible injuries and did not seek treatment for any after his arrest, court records state.
About 10 a.m., a Midtown teen on house arrest answered the door at his home near 24th Avenue and Jackson Street and saw it was a student he knew from school. The two had previous trouble, the charging information states.
At the door, “Daidryon” asked for someone who didn’t live there and was turned away. But minutes later, the teen heard someone trying to get in the back door. He called his mother, who was at a doctor’s appointment, and she told him to call police, court records state.
That’s when the five black and two white officers began searching the area and saw Sparks and Cousins running for cover, the report said. Once caught, Cousins said he and Sparks had been “playing hide and seek with some 10- and 12-year -olds,” the arrest report states. Police noted they saw no children in the area. School was in session at the time of the arrest.
Monroe set $300 bail for Cousins and ordered a drug court evaluation for Sparks, who tested positive for marijuana.
“My concern is you are hanging out with a 22-year-old and you ran from the police,” Monroe told him.