Women accuse Fort Worth police officer of excessive force in arrest shown in video
A shopping trip to West Seventh Street for two close friends turned into a spontaneous dinner at the Concrete Cowboy, the kind of outing that has become rare for them during the coronavirus pandemic. That led to a drink, and then a few more.
When the two women, 26 and 28, got to America Gardens sometime around 9 p.m. on Sept. 3, they acknowledge they were intoxicated. But they told the Star-Telegram they mostly stayed to themselves, even if the 28-year-old noted they were perhaps dancing too much for social-distancing concerns. They didn’t buy any food or drinks, they said, and after a short time were being escorted out of the bar and restaurant because they were drunk.
The Fort Worth residents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were put into handcuffs at that time. One police officer helped two private security guards remove them from the business, according to the police department.
When the friends made it outside, they said, the officer violently took them into custody in a struggle captured on camera by a stranger.
The video clip has made its way onto Twitter and Reddit, where many have commented it looks like excessive force in a time of ongoing protests across the country over police brutality.
In the cellphone video, the 28-year-old is on her knees on the ground as a Fort Worth police officer in a blue mask presses onto her back with his right knee and his hands. Her friend is standing, also in handcuffs, struggling with a security guard. There are screams, cries, commotion in the background. Someone shouts: “Stop resisting!”
As the security guard is pulling the 26-year-old backward, she appears to kick the police officer with her right leg, his head pushed backward. The officer in turn spins around, punches her several times in her upper body and face and throws her headfirst into the ground. He returns to her friend, pushing on her back, harder than before.
“That cop needs to relax,” a person can be heard saying on the video. “That’s excessive.”
The 28-year-old woman said she was left with bruises around her wrists, from the handcuffs, and down her spine, from where the officer had his knee in her back. She had a bump on the back of her neck as a result of the officer trying to put her into a chokehold, she said.
Her friend’s injuries were more severe — one of her knees was split open, a gash went up her right arm and the left side of her face was swollen from the officer’s punches, the 26-year-old woman said. She said she needed 11 stitches. She has had problems walking straight.
Capt. Mark Barthen, a police spokesperson, said in an email on Wednesday the security guards at America Gardens were struggling to remove the two intoxicated women when they flagged down an officer driving by. They were detaining the friends for “fighting with staff after they refused to serve them,” and had managed to put a single handcuff onto one of their wrists, he said. “Security guards are permitted to detain someone when an offense is being committed,” Barthen said.
As the officer tried to control the woman on the ground, Barthen said, the other woman who was standing up kicked him in face. This caused pain and visible injury to the officer, Barthen said.
Police are investigating the officer’s response that was caught on camera, he said. The department didn’t release the man’s name, or say if he has faced complaints before.
“The Fort Worth Police Department takes every use of force incident seriously,” Barthen said, “and our policy requires that all use of force incidents be thoroughly reviewed by the involved officer’s chain of command and our use of force coordinator/use of force review board to ensure that all policies and procedures are followed.”
There are no police body camera videos of the incident, he said in response to a public information request from the Star-Telegram. The officer didn’t have his camera on “until after the situation settled down,” he said, and officers who later came to help “did not arrive in time to capture what happened.”
America Gardens said in a message sent over Facebook, “We have no comment at this time. FWPD is doing an investigation into (the) issue.”
Both women are facing charges of disorderly conduct and public intoxication, according to a police incident report. In addition, the 28-year-old is facing a charge of resisting arrest, and the 26-year-old is facing charges of interfering with public duties and assaulting a public servant, records show.
Some on social media have pointed to the 26-year-old apparently kicking the officer as he was on top of her friend as justification for her rough arrest. “Behave like a savage, get treated like one,” reads one response to a tweet of the video.
The 26-year-old didn’t want to comment about that moment in the video.
Both women emphasized during separate interviews with the Star-Telegram over the weekend they believe there’s no excuse for an officer to assault someone who is handcuffed and unarmed and not posing a clear threat. They are seeking the dismissal of all of their charges, and on Saturday filed complaints with the police department against the officer, they said.
The 26-year-old said she also believes race has to be considered in the incident, with an officer, who is white, attacking both of them, Hispanic women, in the Seventh Street district with a history of complaints of racial discrimination.
“It’s both — race and police brutality,” she said of their arrests. “When else have you ever seen anything like that happen on Seventh Street with somebody — I’m sorry — but somebody who’s Caucasian?”
‘He did not justify anything’
Bryan Gaona, 25, of Fort Worth, started filming that night as the arrests began to escalate, he said. He later uploaded the video to Twitter, where it has amassed more than 120 retweets and generated a debate on the officer’s use of force in the comments.
The clip later spread to Reddit. It has inspired a similar debate.
Gaona in a Twitter message said he watched as the “cop got kicked in the face” and then “went crazy on the girl and just started punching both victims.”
“The way cops are nowadays,” he said, “something inside me just said film it and I did.”
As it was happening, the 26-year-old woman can remember the officer screaming that her friend was resisting arrest, even though she “was clearly on the ground with both of her hands on the floor.” She remembers the officer coming toward her, his punches forcing her back, before her head went into the hard ground. She’s not sure if she lost consciousness, she said.
The 28-year-old felt the officer and the security guards were combative throughout the ordeal, instead of calmly asking them to leave, she said. “I don’t know what their mission was.”
She would like to see the Fort Worth Police Department at the very least hold the officer in question accountable.
“I’m having to deal with my consequences for being out in public and drinking at a restaurant of whatever,” she said. “I think he needs to be held responsible for his actions as well.”
As the 26-year-old continues to recover from her injuries, with her bruises and swelling still sensitive to the touch, she said she would like to see the officer charged.
“He did not justify anything by him punching me in the face and throwing me into the ground and having me get these stitches,” she said. “He should be re-evaluated into being a police officer right now with all these things that are going on with other police officers.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2020 at 12:10 PM.
