Charles Read Lawsuit: False Arrest, Dropped Charges, Civil Case

Charles Read, a 41-year-old Georgia man who has used a wheelchair for 25 years, was arrested in March 2025 by College Park police on felony charges of aggravated assault and home invasion built on allegations he physically could not have carried out. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office dropped all charges in April 2025, finding that Read “could not have been at the location on the date and time of the incident.”¹ As of the latest reporting in October 2025, no civil lawsuit by Read has been confirmed, though the city has not apologized and Read has said publicly he believes the department owes him accountability.²

The Accusation That Started It

On June 15, 2024, a woman named Katherine Jensen went to the College Park Police Department and reported that Read, whom she described as a former boyfriend, had kicked down her front door, choked her, and tried to steal her car keys before fleeing on foot.³ Read has said he does not know anyone by that name; the only “Katherine Elizabeth” he ever dated had a different last name and the relationship ended roughly 20 years earlier.

Jensen initially told officers she did not want to press charges. Police pursued a felony warrant anyway. No one contacted Read for his account, and no one appears to have checked whether the man they were charging could walk, let alone kick down a door. The police report also left out that Jensen had been arrested in 2023 by the Newnan Police Department on charges of forgery, theft by deception, and filing a false police report tied to a scheme to defraud Airbnb over cleaning fees.⁴ That arrest was available in a statewide law enforcement database.

The Arrest at the Station

On March 20, 2025, Read went to the College Park police station to turn himself in on the outstanding warrant. Officer Markenley Belotte detained and handcuffed him. Read, paraplegic since age 18 and with limited muscle control, warned officers that cuffing him could cause him to fall from his wheelchair. He did fall, and he stayed on the floor for more than three and a half minutes.³

Body camera footage captured a supervising officer calling the fall an “obvious attempt not to go to jail” and a “ruse.” Another officer at the scene disagreed, saying Read’s legs looked like those of a paralyzed relative and telling colleagues, “You may want to call the district attorney’s office, because if the door was kicked in, he didn’t kick it in.”¹ Belotte himself said on camera, “It don’t look like you could kick anything, no offense, at this point in time.”³ Read was eventually allowed to leave, but the felony warrant stayed active.

How the Charges Were Dropped

In April 2025, Jensen emailed the College Park Police Department recanting. She wrote that her “mental state and physical trauma in that moment worked to confuse me into providing information that needs to be edited” and asked officers to “clear the name of an innocent man.”³ Jensen’s mother also acknowledged that Read had not attacked her daughter.¹

The department initially refused to revoke the warrant. On April 11, 2025, the same day Atlanta News First published its investigation, the Fulton County District Attorney’s office dropped the case, citing the physical impossibility of Read having been there.² Read’s attorney, Andrew Fleischman, confirmed the dismissal. Jensen has not been arrested or charged for filing the false report, and Chief Connie Rogers has not explained why.⁵

The Officer and His Hiring

Officer Markenley Belotte resigned from the College Park Police Department in August 2025, choosing to leave rather than be fired.⁵ His hiring record raised its own questions. In 2022, the Atlanta Police Department rejected Belotte’s application after finding he had been “untruthful” about his employment history, omitted a prior termination, and tried to blame a training officer for the inconsistencies. College Park Police had that information in his file before hiring him in July 2023. Shortly after resigning, Belotte reapplied to the Atlanta Police Department.²

Chief Rogers defended the department’s hiring process as “extensive,” including background checks, character references, a psychological exam, and a command interview, and said “there was nothing discovered in this process that would have prevented Officer Belotte from getting hired,” a statement that sat awkwardly next to the Atlanta rejection sitting in his personnel file.⁵ Rogers declined interview requests to discuss the hiring, the arrest, or the decision not to charge Jensen. The City of College Park said it was “conducting a thorough investigation” but did not apologize to Read.¹

Where a Civil Case Stands

Fleischman argued that officers had a duty “not just to find probable cause, but also to dispel suspicion of a crime” in a “reasonably prompt manner,” and said the officers’ “lack of curiosity about his claims of obvious innocence” was the core failure. In his view, the warrant should never have been sought without first checking whether the allegations were physically plausible.³

Austin Handle, a former Dunwoody, Georgia, police officer and vice chair of the Lamplighter Project, a nonprofit that supports law enforcement whistleblowers, reviewed the case and reached a similar conclusion. Handle said the arresting officer skipped basic investigative work: “All he had to do was call around, maybe actually set up a time to meet with the guy and actually get his side of the story.”²

The available reporting through late October 2025 does not confirm that Read has filed a civil suit against Belotte, the College Park Police Department, or the City of College Park. What it does confirm: charges dismissed, officer gone, no apology, no charges against the accuser, and an internal investigation the city describes as ongoing.²

1
Atlanta News First. Man Who Can’t Walk Arrested for Assault on Foot; Video Raises Questions
2
WALB. College Park Officer Off Force After Falsely Arresting Wheelchair-Bound Man
3
Reason. Georgia Police Tried To Arrest a Paralyzed Man for Kicking Down a Woman’s Door and Assaulting Her
4
WSB-TV. Airbnb Host Emails Fake Police Report To Get Money for Deep Cleaning Service, Newnan Police Say
5
Atlanta News First. College Park Officer Off Force After Falsely Arresting Wheelchair-Bound Man