The family lawyer for a Florida high school student who was seen on video being thrown to the ground by a school resource officer asked the officer to be fired and charged with aggravated assault. A video widely publicized on social media appears to show the policeman throwing the student on the floor, where she remains motionless while being handcuffed.
“We demand that this officer be fired because it is unacceptable that you can do this to our children and not be held responsible,” lawyer Ben Crump told CBS News. “And we also want him to be charged with aggravating assault and assaulting a child, because Taylor was a child, he was an adult man.”
The brief video, which was seen more than 70,000 times on Tuesday night, appears to show the policeman throwing the 16-year-old girl hard on a concrete walkway at Liberty High School in Osceola County. Moments later, the policeman is seen handcuffing her while a second policeman is standing over them.
The officer was placed on administrative leave. Osceola’s superintendent, Dr. Debra Pace, told CBS News that the school district “has no comment at the moment, as this is an investigation pending under the direction of the Florida Police Department.”
The teenager is now recovering at home, where her mother, Jamesha Bracey, says she is experiencing headaches, blurred vision, memory loss and fatigue. Bracey said watching the video made her “upset, upset” and “hurt”.
“No child should have to endure anything like he did. No one, period. And he needs to be held responsible,” she said.
The police officer is an employee of the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office, who said Tuesday night that he is collecting videos and testimony from witnesses. The Sheriff’s Office also said that the officer “was in the process of trying to stop the student from fighting with another student in the hall when the policeman took her into custody. “
According to Bracey, his daughter said she had a “verbal altercation” with another student, but she didn’t fight, and she just remembers “being beaten and waking up in the principal’s office”.
Bracey said the teenager called from school earlier that day to tell her mother that a group of students was planning to attack her after school. Bracey instructed her daughter to tell the dean. “And she did it because the dean called me two minutes after I hung up the phone to say that she was at student service and that he would prefer one of us to come and pick her up because he didn’t want to put her back in the student population until let him investigate what was going on, “explained Bracey.
On the way to school, however, she said she received another call – this time from the assistant principal asking if a paramedic was allowed to check on her daughter. Bracey said he immediately asked what happened, but did not get an explanation.
“He didn’t give me any information over the phone. He handed the phone over to Lieutenant EMT so he could tell me that his vitals were fine and that she had no physical injuries that he could see, and he didn’t think she needed to go to the hospital, “she said. “So I asked him again what happened, still with no information. I didn’t have any information about what happened to my daughter until I arrived at school.”
Upon arriving with her husband, Bracey said she was not informed that her daughter had been knocked unconscious. “It was my daughter who told me she woke up in the office,” she said. “So, apparently something happened, what we are seeing now in the video that went viral.”
“It is obvious that she was unconscious just looking at the video and the fact that she remembers waking up in the director’s office,” said Crump. “It is simply unacceptable that this policeman, this adult man, throw this black girl on the concrete, see that she reacts nothing, but still the handcuffs.”
The Orlando Sentinel reports that the Sheriff’s Office’s use of force policy says officers must use “the minimum amount of force necessary to perform official functions”. Crump said the video makes it clear that the policy has been violated.
“We were contacted by two other families, where they said that this particular deputy, this resource officer, used excessive force against his black daughters. Therefore, we demand justice, ”he said.
Bracey said her next step is to take care of her daughter’s symptoms and ensure that she remains safe. When asked if his daughter would go back to school, Bracey replied, “She won’t be back, no.”