‘I have nothing to hide’: Police officer protests in tears as deputies take away her child in allegedly baseless endangerment claim

“I have nothing to hide,” Mantua Police Officer Miranda L. Brothers, 29, tearfully told Portage County deputies as they took away her child to foster care and brought her to the station for questioning in a now-defunct criminal case. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

The next day, on Jan. 2, 2024, Ohio authorities charged her with child endangerment. They claim she had previously left the child unattended with a sex offender, but prosecutors ended up dropping the case on July 11 — just five days before trial — saying that one of their “essential witnesses” was unavailable for an indefinite time due to medical issues. The situation further escalated, however, when Brothers recently sued the sheriff’s office and said the endangerment case was utterly baseless.

Her lawsuit stated that the sheriff’s office not only arrested her “without evidence” but that a certain detective, named in the complaint as simply John Doe, got his hands on explicit pictures from Brothers’ phone and shared them even though these were unrelated to the endangerment case.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Brothers told investigators on the side of the road after they pulled her over with the child and a dog in her vehicle on Jan. 1, 2024.

That day, investigators asked her to come over to headquarters for questioning and said that they would have to take her child to foster care.

“They’re going to take custody of my kid?” she asked, incredulous. “For what?”

Records show that the date of the alleged criminal offense was Dec. 7, 2023, but according to Brothers’ lawsuit, that was absolutely baseless. At least two detectives on Dec. 7, 2023, were assigned to observe her and her child in connection with the investigation into her parenting. The detectives were positioned outside a restaurant in Mantua, about 30 miles southeast of Cleveland. Both detectives later testified that the child never had “any unsupervised contact with a registered sex offender,” according to the complaint.

Before the Dec. 7 operation, a third detective allegedly “investigated” the allegations against Brother and testified under oath that they were “unfounded” and “not accurate.”

Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.

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