PHILADELPHIA — The worst day of Karen Brookins’ life was March 18, 2022 — the day her first-born child, Marcus Boone, died by suicide.

The second-worst day, she said, was when she learned that a Philadelphia police officer who responded to the scene took a picture of her son’s body — and then shared it with others.

Two years after Brookins’ 39-year-old son jumped to his death from a highway overpass in Northeast Philadelphia, she has filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that in the immediate moments after Boone hit the ground below, a police officer leaned over the railing and took a photo of his body, lying on the pavement. The image later circulated on the internet and ended up in the hands of a stranger who unknowingly showed it to the grieving mother.

Brookins learned of the photo a few weeks after her son’s death, when she returned to the area desperate for more information about what happened in the three hours police spent with Boone, trying to talk him off the ledge before he ended his life. She visited the gas station across from the overpass, she said, and asked an employee whether he had heard about the man who jumped a few weeks earlier.

“Oh my God, yeah it’s crazy,” she said the man told her. “I got a picture of him laying in the road dead. Wanna see it?”

Brookins nearly fainted. She asked him how he got it.

“One of my cop buddies took it,” she said he replied.

He asked for her phone number, she said, then sent her the photo.

She peppered him with questions: Who sent the photo? What’s his name? He said he couldn’t remember, Brookins said. Then, realizing she knew the victim, she said he warned her that “cops around here don’t like people talking.”

She walked to her car, stared at the photo, and sobbed.

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