Additional Victims of Pervert Colorado Jail Commander Sue La Plata County, and There Could be More

A second class action lawsuit has been filed by eighteen women who say they were victims of a former La Plata County jail commander accused of accessing and watching videos of over 100 female inmates being strip-searched while in custody.

Edward Aber has been charged with 117 counts of invasion of privacy for sexual gratification after the Colorado Bureau of Investigation discovered he accessed videos of 117 female inmates being strip-searched and watched the videos thousands of times between 2019 and early 2024.

Three victims announced a class action lawsuit against Aber, La Plata County and Sheriff Sean Smith in August. Now eighteen more victims have filed an additional class action suit against Aber, La Plata County’s Board of Commissioners, Sheriff Smith and two jail staffers who the victims allege were aware of Aber’s invasive actions. Attorneys for the larger group of women say the groups will be combined into one class, and a judge will appoint interim counsel while considering whether to certify the class.

One of the plaintiffs in the newly filed lawsuit, a former inmate who goes by C.B., spent 22 months in La Plata County Jail. Now 44, C.B. has been out for a year and a half, but was unaware of Aber’s misconduct until she received a letter in the mail informing her she was a victim. C.B. says she was strip-searched at least once a month during her lockup, sometimes three or four times. She assumed this was routine, but consultation with legal counsel filled her in on the details.

“I was angry, upset,” she says. “I felt betrayed. I’d put my trust in this man.”

Aber resigned from his position in July 2024 while being investigated for allegations of making sexual contact with female inmates and harassing female employees, but no charges were filed in that investigation. A group of fourteen female La Plata County Jail employees had banded together to complain about sexual harassment by Aber, who allegedly called one woman staffer “sexy in a white trash way.”

The investigation led to an audit of Aber’s use of evidence.com, a database where he could view recorded strip searches of female inmates. The investigation accuses Aber of the following:

•Accessing the jail’s evidence database at least 3,166 times over a five-year period.

•Accessing at least 117 videos of strip searches of 115 women.

•Viewing videos of women on suicide watch, who were forced to strip naked while being recorded.

•Rewatching the same strip search videos multiple times, and by one official’s description, “countless” times.

•Watching these videos from the jail, his home, hotel rooms in Denver, residential addresses in Arizona and elsewhere.

•Watching these videos late at night and into the early morning.

•Watching the same videos even years after the strip search occurred.

•Preserving videos and photos of the strip searches on his personal devices, which he wiped when he discovered the investigation.

C.B. was arrested in Cortez on a federal drug warrant before being taken to La Plata County Jail; the Cortez Jail wasn’t a federal holding facility, but Aber’s jail is.

“I’d never been in trouble before,” she recalls. “I was a newbie, I didn’t know what was happening.”

On arrival at La Plata County Jail, C.B. says she was read her charges and booked, received a jail uniform, and was then taken into a restroom with a female deputy wearing a body camera. “Then you go through the strip search,” she details. “Lift the left side, right side of your boob, squat, bend over, spread your cheeks, lift your hair, all that kind of stuff.”

In a revision of the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office Policy Manual dated May 7, 2025 – well after Aber’s resignation – the jail’s strip search policy is much stricter. It says “No individual in temporary custody at any La Plata County Sheriff’s Office facility shall be subjected to a strip search unless there is reasonable suspicion based on specific and articulable facts.”

The policy also states that a written authorization from a watch commander must be obtained before a strip search, and also mandates that the search “shall not be reproduced through a visual or sound recording.” However, those rules were not in place during C.B.’s nearly two years in La Plata County Jail.

“There were a lot of strip searches,” C.B. says of her tenure. “I can’t even tell you how many. I thought that they were just looking for contraband, or whatever, but I thought it was routine.”

But it wasn’t routine, and C.B. says the harassment didn’t stop there.

“I felt uncomfortable a lot. There’s times when I was on my period, and I was asked to remove my tampon and hand it to the deputy. I couldn’t throw it away; I physically had to stand there and take it out in front of her and put it in her hand. It was the most embarrassing, gross thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

C.B. thinks it’s a travesty that Aber is charged with misdemeanors rather than felonies and harsher charges. “It’s ridiculous,” she says. “That’s too many people, that’s not a misdemeanor.”

C.B.’s counsel, Neil Singh Sandhu, says they’re in the process of serving the defendants, who include two jail employees who refused a request from Aber to watch strip searches of female inmates but did not report Aber when he said he’d do it himself.

The next step for plaintiffs and their attorneys is appearing in front of a judge, who will decide on consolidating the two cases. From there, they will continue to identify victims of Aber as class members as the lawsuit proceeds.

Sandhu says the number of plaintiffs could be more than the 115 identified in CBI’s investigation. “It’s possible there are women who were abused before 2019, or women who were abused in a different way,” he says.