Eighteen women are suing La Plata County in southwestern Colorado alleging that its jail’s top commander accessed invasive videos of deputies searching and prodding their naked bodies for contraband and watched the footage thousands of times from his home, office and hotel rooms for his personal gratification.
The federal class-action lawsuit filed Wednesday accuses Edward Aber, the former jail commander, of watching strip-search videos of 115 women over and over by accessing the jail’s evidence database at least 3,166 times over five years. Attorneys expect the number of victims to grow.
Aber allegedly accessed the videos in the early-morning and late-night hours, stored the videos and screenshots from the strip searches on his personal devices and wiped them when he realized he was being investigated, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit names Aber, as well as Sheriff Sean Smith, the county’s board of commissioners and two other jail officials, who attorneys say failed to report Aber’s misconduct and failed to place controls on access to strip-search footage.
“This wasn’t just one person who abused these women. It was a system that abused these women,” Siddhartha Rathod, an attorney on the case, said Thursday. “It was deputies recording cavity searches of women. It was deputies uploading these highly explicit videos to a database. It was other deputies ignoring huge red flags of sexual harassment.”
A La Plata County sheriff’s employee Thursday deferred all questions on the case to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which launched a probe into Aber earlier this year. The county’s commissioners did not immediately return a request for comment.
Aber, 62, was charged in July with 117 counts of invasion of privacy for sexual gratification and one count of first-degree official misconduct, all misdemeanors, court records show. CBI investigators found that he viewed the sensitive footage between Feb. 14, 2019, and Jan. 14, 2024.
His lawyer in the criminal case, Barrie Newberger King, did not immediately return an email or a voicemail left at her office.
A 44-year-old woman from Cortez told The Colorado Sun that deputies did not tell her she was being recorded as they ordered her to take her clothes off and inspected her body, sometimes three to four times a month.
“It’s really uncomfortable for us who are vulnerable to what is going on. … They tell us what to do and that’s basically it. We have no voice in there at all,” said the woman, who asked to be identified as C.B. to protect her identity as a victim of sexual abuse. “It’s really a huge violation of our privacy when things like this happen.”
C.B., who was incarcerated for 22 months inside the La Plata County jail, said her criminal attorney contacted her earlier this summer alerting her that the invasive videos showing her being strip-searched may have been viewed by Aber.
“I believe that he should be definitely held accountable for the things that he has done in his power that not a lot of us were even aware of,” she said. “I think that it should be out there and people should know about it.”
Aber gained access to the videos through evidence.com, a digital evidence management system, when he was promoted to jail commander in 2018. Aber resigned in July 2024 as officials investigated allegations that he made sexual contact with female inmates and sexually harassed numerous female employees, the CBI said. No charges were filed in the case.
The La Plata County sheriff’s policy was to store every strip-search video on the jail’s database, even if no contraband was found and allow every employee with a lieutenant rank or higher, to access the videos at any time, even after the person was no longer incarcerated at the jail, the lawsuit said.
Per jail policy, jail deputies are required to wear body-worn cameras during the strip searches and the footage includes up-close shots of the most intimate parts of the women’s bodies.
“Nobody ever told you why you were getting strip-searched,” C.B. said, describing deputies forcing her to reveal her genitals for inspection, squat and cough without explanation. “They just took us in there and did it.”
The sheriff “placed no limits” on the purpose for which his employees could access the strip-search videos, what time of day they could access them, where they could access them from or how many times they could view the videos, the lawsuit said. Employees could also download the videos and the sheriff did not monitor or audit how the videos were being accessed, according to the lawsuit.
Aber told employees he was watching the videos and asked his male subordinates to join him, the lawsuit said. He also visited female inmates in their cells and brought them into his office, where one jail employee once found Aber at his desk with a female inmate crouched beneath it near his crotch, the lawsuit said.
Aber said the inmate was fixing wires under his desk, the lawsuit said.
He also took women out of the jail on “errands,” bringing them to industrial parks where they would do chores, like fold clothes, while he watched and talked to them, the lawsuit said.
The trips were apparent to the public, as the women who were eager to leave the jail were still wearing their “highly visible” jail uniforms, according to the lawsuit.
Aber allegedly sent a nude cartoon to a woman through social media after she was released from the jail and told her it reminded him of her, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit accuses the sheriff of failing to train, supervise or discipline Aber and other staff who “looked away.”
Prior to the La Plata County sheriff’s office, Aber worked for the Durango police department from 1997 to 2005, according to the lawsuit. Last month, a separate class-action lawsuit was also filed against Aber, La Plata County and the sheriff’s office.