Ghanaian shopper awarded $35,000 after wrongful strip search

Portland, US -- A Multnomah County jury has awarded a Ghanaian migrant $35,000 after a Walgreens employee who wrongly suspected him of shoplifting ordered him to strip down to his bare chest in the middle of the store.

Henry Peth was overcome with embarrassment and shame on the busiest shopping day of the year -- the day after Thanksgiving 2010 -- when employees confronted with their suspicions that he was stealing batteries at the Walgreens at 2829 N. Lombard St. Peth, an immigrant from Ghana, thinks he was targeted because he is black, and he told the employees so.

During a three-day trial last week, Peth testified that he was shopping for Christmas lights. When the store's assistant manager, Daniel Martinez, approached him, saying someone had seen Peth put something in his pocket. Peth responded that he had nothing but his cell phone. Peth then testified that a clerk declared that Peth was lying and that the merchandise must be under his sweatshirt.

About that time Jeffrey Biesenthal, the store's manager, arrived and, according to Peth, the three men boxed him in, in a narrow aisle. Peth said the assistant manager told him that if he didn't have anything, he needed to "take it off." After Peth shed all three layers and shook them out, the employees found no merchandise.

Peth's Portland attorney, Greg Kafoury, told jurors that the "systemic stripping" left Peth disgraced -- particularly because the 44-year-old had lived the first 32 years of his life in an African farming community, where honesty and reputation are everything. Thieves are beaten with bamboo, Kafoury said.

"In Ghana, thieves stealing milk or a chicken are stealing food from the mouth of someone else's child," Kafoury said. "They are paraded on market day. Publicly shunned. The family shamed."

But the Walgreens manager and assistant manager told jurors that Peth lifted up his shirts to expose his chest without being asked. They said they never ordered him to do so.

A clerk working the photo counter said she saw him wearing only his undershirt before turning away. Her account conflicted with that of the other employees.

The law allows shopkeepers to question and reasonably confine someone if they have probable cause to suspect shoplifting. But employees didn't confine Peth, said Nicholas Kampars, the attorney representing Walgreens, the nation's largest drugstore chain with roughly 7,800 stores.

Kafoury sought video of the confrontation, but the store manager said it didn't exist. Walgreens, however, produced video just before the confrontation of Peth walking down the battery aisle. It shows Peth looking at goods and touching them, but not taking them.

Jurors unanimously decided that the employees had probable cause to stop Peth and that he had been confined, and 9-3 that the confinement wasn't reasonable. After a full afternoon of deliberations, they voted 9-3 to award him the $35,000.

Peth phoned his mother hours later -- at 6 a.m. in Ghana -- to tell her that the family name had been cleared. He said he feels vindicated. It will take him some time, though, to recover from the psychological trauma of wrongly being branded a thief, he said.

"I feel much better," he said. "Justice has been served."

-- Aimee Green