Wake deputies defend force used against owner of Raleigh LGBTQ bar during protest

Before the loud bursts, not long after midnight Monday, Tim Lemuel told the approaching officers that he was in the parking lot of his own business.

He was there, in front of Ruby Deluxe, a bar catering to LGBTQ people on South Salisbury Street, partly to deter vandals. The night before, the bar’s glass doors had been bashed in and a window was spray-painted with what appeared to be a white power symbol, he said.

Lemuel feared more damage amid a second night of protest against police brutality. More than 1,000 people had filled the streets of downtown Raleigh the night before. By early morning, storefronts had been shattered and streets littered with tear gas canisters and rubber bullets launched by police into the crowds.

Lemuel set up a first-aid station for protesters in his parking lot. He said he and some friends handed out water bottles and granola bars and helped people wash tear gas and pepper spray out of their eyes for about seven hours before they saw six law enforcement officers turn toward them.

“Move!” an officer can be heard yelling in a now widely circulated video of the event. “Move!”

“This is my business,” Lemuel yells back, gesturing toward the building. “I rent this place.”

The group of officers keeps approaching.

“You’ve been told!” an officer says.

Lemuel begins to walk toward the bar.

The officers round the corner of a neighboring building, and one pumps what appears to be a shotgun.

“I don’t care where you go, you gotta go,” the officer says.

Then the sound and flash of two shots.

“Move!” the officer yells, as Lemuel continues walking. “The game is over. Get out!”

“This is my business,” Lemuel says again, before the video cuts off.

Sheriff’s Office defends ‘less-lethal force’

The officers were Wake County sheriff’s deputies, and they were responding to an anonymous tip that people were supplying water and other supplies to protesters, Eric Curry, a spokesman for the sheriff, said in an email.

He would not name the officers nor the type of munitions or gun, other than to say it’s a tool “for riot-related crime control.”

“We will say only that the strategy to use ‘less-lethal force’ was appropriate, for the safety of subjects,” Curry wrote. “Once deputies urge the crowd to disperse several times and there is non-compliance, the next step is to disperse the crowd.”

Curry told WRAL the deputies fired two audible charges without projectiles. “They were loud bangs, and they were deployed by a shotgun,” Curry said, according to WRAL.

In his email to The N&O, Curry said the approach worked — the group disbanded.

Jen Varani was in that group. She took cover in her car.

“I could see how, with everything that was going on, how things could be heightened and their goal to disperse crowds that are being destructive or being harmful, would be necessary,” Varani said. “But we weren’t chanting. We weren’t yelling. We weren’t gesturing to them. There was nothing that we were doing to instigate a response like that.”

Luckily no one got hurt, Lemuel said. But some of his friends and employees were terrified.

“I was in the Army for eight years, so the bangs didn’t bother me, but my staff were scared out of their minds,” Lemuel said. “If you’ve never been in that situation it appears like you’re going to be killed.”

Part of what made the event so shocking, Lemuel and Varani said, is that deputies had been watching them for hours. The bar is near the Wake County Justice Center.

“During the seven hours, they had, you know, every opportunity to come down and check on us, see what was going on or tell us their concerns,” said Lemuel, who has owned Ruby Deluxe for five years.

“They just chose not to. And at some point they just went straight for guns blazing.”

The sheriff’s office use of force policy says, “It is the policy of the Wake County Sheriff’s Office that no weapon, either deadly or less-than-lethal will be used against any subject that is offering only passive or verbal resistance.

“Members may be justified in using less-than-lethal weapons against a subject who poses an immediate risk of death or serious physical injury to themselves or others and other less forceful options are not reasonably available.”

City Council members ‘distraught’

On social media, many people have expressed horror at the deputies’ handling of the situation.

Among those who disapprove are two members of the Raleigh City Council.

After council member Nicole Stewart watched the video, she sent a copy to City Manager Ruffin Hall and Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown to have it investigated.

“I was quite distraught,” she said. “Had it been anybody, it would have been bad enough. The idea that it was an individual, a business owner, trying to help other individuals in our community made it that much more startling. And I couldn’t let it sit.”

Council member Saige Martin was sent the video by multiple people, and said he knows the establishment well as a queer person. He was one of two openly LGBTQ people elected to the council in 2019 — a first for the city.

“It is a safe space for so many people,” he said. “It is a home to queer folks.”

The people were communicating with police, had no ill intent and had nothing in their hands, Martin said. They were providing resources for people who had been injured and were passing out water and food to people at the protest, he said.

“For the response to be the game is over?” Martin said. “When I heard that, it made the hair on my body stand up.”

At the start of Pride Month — an annual celebration of the LGBTQ community in June — Martin said he was reminded of the “black and brown trans and queer bodies that started the queer liberation movement in New York in Stonewall.”

“We are still dealing with those same issues for those same people today,” he said. “And hearing those words echo so aggressively as if there was a game to be had? I think (it) speaks perfectly well to the kind of culture and thinking that exists and pervades law enforcement today.”

This story was originally published June 2, 2020 at 6:13 PM.