‘You All Are Two Racist Cops’: Ohio Deputies Claim They ‘Found’ Drugs in Black Driver’s Car, But Only Charged Him After He Sued for Profiling
Ohio sheriff’s deputies waited an entire year after pulling over a Black man for minor traffic infractions before they filed felony charges of drug possession against him, claiming they had found drugs in his car during the traffic stop.
But that only happened after Henry Ray filed a lawsuit against the Cuyahoga County sheriff’s deputies, accusing them of racial profiling — indicating the felony drug charges were an apparent attempt to intimidate and retaliate against the 32-year-old Black man for filing the lawsuit.
Those charges were dismissed, and now Ray’s attorney is suggesting the deputies planted the drugs on him.
“You know you don’t get rid of drug charges if drugs were present in that car,” attorney Scott Ramsey told News 5 Cleveland.
“So if that’s what happened, if the drugs were planted there, then somebody has to be held responsible for that.”
Listed in the lawsuit as defendants are Cuyahoga County sheriff’s deputies James DeCredico and Isen Vajusi, who are accused of pulling Ray over for a minor infraction before accusing him of driving a stolen car, then of possessing drugs, none of which were true.
The deputies then handcuffed and placed him in the back of a patrol car while they searched his car after claiming a police dog alerted them to drugs, the claim states.
Both DeCredico and Vajusi are part of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Downtown Safety Patrol, which overwhelmingly focuses on stopping and citing Black drivers, according to an investigation by News 5 Cleveland and the Marshall Project.
And Vajusi has a troubled history as a law enforcement officer, where he was forced to resign from another Ohio law enforcement agency for unfit behavior before he was hired by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department in June 2023, where he has been involved in at least two shootings of unarmed teenagers, at least one of whom was Black.
“The two shootings by Vajusi — in October 2024 and May — are strikingly similar,” reported The Marshall Project in June.
“In each instance, Vajusi opened fire within seconds of exiting his cruiser. He can be heard repeatedly claiming the teens were armed, but neither was.”
Vajusi’s history is similar to the history of former Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 within two seconds of arriving on the scene because he claimed the boy was reaching for what turned out to be a toy gun. Loehmann had been hired despite being fired from another law enforcement agency for being unfit for the job.
‘You All Are Two Racist Cops’
It was Oct. 6, 2023, and Ray had just left a gas station to visit co-workers when he was pulled over by the two deputies who had also been at the same gas station minutes earlier.
Ray accused the deputies of racially profiling him, according to body camera footage.
“You see a Black dude in a Camaro,” Ray told deputies. “You all are two racist cops. You pulled me over for no reason.”
The deputies told Ray they were pulling him over for infractions regarding his “tail light and/or illumination of rear plate,” the claim states.
They then accused him of driving a stolen car, which he proved to be false after he showed them proof of ownership.
And it just got worse from there, with the deputies ordering him out of the car and slamming him against the hood of the car before handcuffing him and placing him in the back of a patrol car.
While handcuffed in the patrol car, the deputies claimed a police dog alerted them to the presence of drugs, which is when they searched it without his consent, claiming to have found weed, pills and white powder.
But for reasons they never explained, they did not arrest him for the alleged drugs, although they cited him for the alleged tail light and license plate infraction.
It was only after Ray filed a lawsuit on October 3, 2024, that deputies decided to charge him for the drugs they claimed they had found in his car a year earlier.
The felony drug charges were filed against Ray on October 24, 2024, Cuyahoga County online court records show. But those charges were dismissed earlier this year.
Ray refiled his lawsuit earlier this month with a different attorney after voluntarily dismissing the initial lawsuit in January 2025 while fighting the criminal charges against him, court records show.
“Defendant(s) DeCredico and/or Vajusi had either planted drugs in Plaintiff’s vehicle or falsely accused Plaintiff of possessing drugs that were never found in his vehicle at all,” the claim states.
“By planting drugs and/or accusing Plaintiff of possessing drugs that did not exist, Defendant(s) Decredico and/or Vajusi violated Plaintiff’s 4th and 14th Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures,” the new lawsuit states.
‘Looks Like a Fishing Expedition’
Cuyahoga County Sheriff Harold Pretel told local media he does not believe his deputies would plant drugs.
“I think that’s way off base,” Pretel told News 5 Cleveland. “I don’t have any facts here, but that behavior by our deputy sheriffs, I think, is something unexpected and hard to believe.”
But perhaps the sheriff is in denial, because the journalistic investigation by News 5 Cleveland and The Marshall Project determined the downtown safety patrol was making pretextual stops against Black people, which is when deputies pull people over for minor or fabricated infractions in the hopes of finding something more serious to arrest them on.
In fact, of the 4,400 drivers they pulled over in 2023 and 2024, more than two-thirds were not cited or arrested, not only indicating the initial reasons for the traffic stops were baseless but that they had failed to find something more serious to charge the drivers with after pulling them over.
However, more than 75 percent of the citations issued by the downtown safety patrol during those years were to Black people, even though Black people make up only 29 percent of Cuyahoga County residents, according to the U.S. Census.
Of those citations issued to Black people, 60 percent involved minor infractions like illegal tinted windows, not wearing a seatbelt, or driving with a suspended license.
And none of that is a surprise to Ray, who suspected he was being racially profiled from the moment he was pulled over.
“I definitely thought these (deputies) were fishing,” Ray told local media. “You told me you stopped me for one thing. Then later you started coming with other things of what you stopped me for.”
Jeff Wenninger, a retired Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant, viewed the footage at the request of News 5 Cleveland and also believed Ray had been racially profiled.
“This was about a pretext stop looking for something greater than the actual violation,” Wenninger said.
“I would challenge the legality of the search and what they claimed to be the actual alert that qualified and rose this to the level of probable cause.”
Civil rights attorney Stanley Jackson of the Cochran Firm, Cleveland, who represents the families of innocent bystanders killed during high-speed pursuits involving deputies from the Downtown Safety Patrol, told local media he was “shocked by the numbers.”
“I knew that there was probably a vast representation of African Americans being pulled over, but I didn’t know that it was that drastic. It looks like a fishing expedition.”