Before he was accused of beating a handcuffed African-American woman, a Chicago Police sergeant registered a racist URL: n**gadown.com.
George Granias, a sergeant at the heart of a recently settled police brutality lawsuit, purchased at least two websites with racial slurs in their titles, his alleged victim’s lawyer says. The domain names include URLs like n**gaguns.com, the legal team first told CBS Chicago. An investigation by The Daily Beast revealed a series of other domains registered to Granias’ name and address, including “murdertech.com,” “necroarmy.com,” and in a jab to Illinois’ former governor, “patquinnsucks.com”.
In December 2013, Granias registered n**gadown.com, internet records show. Three months later, police arrested Patasa Johnson, a Chicago woman, at a traffic stop. Johnson’s arresting officer accused her of driving drunk, a charge she denied, and which was later dropped. The officer cuffed her in the back of a squad car and drove her to a police station, where “Granias grabbed [Johnson] from the back of the car,” and roughly escorted her into the station, according to a lawsuit Johnson filed against the city in 2015. “Inside the station, Defendant Granias beat [Johnson] while [Johnson] was in hand-cuffs.”
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Johnson required medical treatment for her injuries, and later reached a settlement agreement with the city, according to Johnson’s lawyer. The city is expected to shell out a $185,000 settlement, the details of which are still being finalized.
But while researching Granias in preparation for Johnson’s suit, Johnson’s legal team discovered his website n**gadown.com
“We came across that URL and said what the hell is this?” Brendan Shiller, Johnson’s attorney, told The Daily Beast. Though the website was blank when Shiller and his team found it through a simple search for Granias’ name, its presence in Google search results suggests Granias did more than buy the racist domain name: He actually launched a website, Shiller said.
“He made it live and accessible to the public,” Shiller said. “You can create a website, but Google wouldn’t know about it unless you make it live and accessible.”
At least one publicly available domain name database still linked Granias with n**gadown.com on Wednesday, the day CBS Chicago first reported that Shiller had discovered Granias’ stash of domain names. That same day, a person calling himself George Granias asked the website to remove the page that listed him as the owner of n**gadown.com.
“Please remove my info from n**gadown.com,” the person posting under the name George Granias wrote on Wednesday. “I haven’t owned it in years and your information is false.”
Though the website is no longer active, Granias’ registration is still active and does not expire until the end of the year, website registration data shows.
But Granias owns a number of other domain names, The Daily Beast has learned. Among them are “n**gaguns.com,” a handful of violently named sites like “murdertech.com” and “deathcomescalling.com,” and a series of vaguely pornographic names like “supremegirl.com,” “naomiscarlet.com,” and “conditionaldating.com”. Granias also registered “patquinnsucks.com,” “necroarmy.com,” and two domains with the name of a local Chicago university.
The domains were listed under Granias’ name and address.
“The fact that somebody in leadership at the Chicago Police Department would take the time to purchase these URLs,” is even more unsettling in light of Granias’ disciplinary record, Shiller said.
While representing Johnson, Shiller learned that Granias had three marks on his disciplinary record. Three of these blemishes—called sustained complaint registers—are rare on Chicago’s police force. An investigation by the Chicago Tribune found that a near-negligible percentage of complaints against officers were ever ruled as “sustained.”
“Over four years ending in mid-December 2014, investigators ‘sustained’ a little fewer than 800 of the approximately 17,700 complaints, just over 4 percent,” the Tribune report found.
Of those fewer than 800 complaints, three belonged to Granias.
“Defendant Granias has three sustained CRs,” Johnson’s lawsuit reads. “More specifically, from the limited records that Plaintiff has obtained from the City, it appears that Defendant Granias was accused of punching [a] minor in the face, then kicking the minor in his stomach, then kicking the minor about his body, chest and face. Defendant Granias was then accused of banging the minor’s head against a wall.”
Shiller said Granias’ domain purchases cast the beatings in a new light.
“When you look at what he did in this case, in conjunction with his disciplinary record, in conjunction with this bizarre hobby of buying racist and kind of pornographic domain names, this is not somebody who should be a sergeant in the police department,” he said.
Granias is still on the Chicago Police force, which did not return The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Thursday. The department told CBS Chicago that they were investigating the websites. Shiller said the department had not rejected the allegation that Granias bought the racist websites.
“They didn’t deny it. There’s been no denial,” Shiller said. “There’s been responses and no denial.”
