Video catches Maryland police beating unarmed student, unprovoked
Officers caught beating student on video had blamed injuries on their horses
Three Maryland police officers were caught beating an unarmed student following post-basketball game revelry in a videotape released Monday.
The incident, recorded in part by another student Mar. 3 following a Maryland basketball victory, shows several officers in riot gear beating the student with batons. The officers deliver roughly a dozen blows as the student crumples to the ground.
John McKenna, 21, was subsequently charged with “felonies on suspicion of assaulting officers on horseback and their mounts,” but prosecutors dropped charges Monday as the video was released.
“The video shows the charging documents were nothing more than a cover, a fairy tale they made up to cover for the officers’ misconduct,” Christopher A. Griffiths, a lawyer for the student, told the Washington Post. “The video shows gratuitous violence against a defenseless individual.”
The Post notes that the beating “occurred March 3 near the university’s College Park campus after the Maryland men’s basketball team defeated Duke. After the game, students took to the streets to celebrate. Twenty-eight people were arrested or cited, sparking a debate between police and students over how and when it is appropriate to break up a group of revelers.”
The video shows McKenna on the sidewalk as he skips and throws his arms in the air. He stops about five feet from an officer on horseback, the video shows. In the video, McKenna’s arms appear to be in front of him, but he does not appear to touch the officer or the horse. His hands are empty.
McKenna backs up, then two county police riot officers rush toward him from the street, the video shows. The officers slam McKenna against a wall and beat him with their batons. McKenna crumples to the ground.
ADVERTISEMENTAs McKenna falls, a third county police riot officer strikes his legs and torso with his baton. The video shows the officers striking an unresisting McKenna about the head, torso and legs — more than a dozen blows in all.
Other riot police officers on horseback who are captured on tape don’t intervene as the student is beaten to the ground.
In charging the student, police initially said McKenna and another student “provoked the beating” by attacking the mounted officers. The Post reports that the charging documents asserted that the horses, rather than the officers, had injured McKenna — a claim impossible to defend once the video of the incident went public.
An ABC News affiliate reported Tuesday that one of the officers has been suspended and several others could be fired.
“Some of these characters ought to go to jail,” McKenna’s family said in a statement to ABC. “Some ought to merely be booted off the force, and the remainder should be properly trained to discover that force is not always necessary, and brutality is always wrong.”
The Post has more details here.
This video is from The Washington Post, broadcast April 12, 2010.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been altered from its original version. It was expanded to provide more detail about the incident.
Former Chinese premier Li Peng -- known as the "Butcher of Beijing" for his role in the Tiananmen Square crackdown -- has died at the age of 90, state media said Tuesday.
Li died of an unspecified illness in Beijing after he failed to respond to medical treatment late Monday, the official Xinhua news agency said. The ex-premier had previously battled bladder cancer.
Li gained notoriety worldwide as one of the key architects of the brutal breakup of mass pro-democracy demonstrations in the capital on June 4, 1989, and stayed at the top of the Communist regime for more than a decade, while remaining a hated symbol of the repression until his death.
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Video catches Maryland police beating student
Video caught several county police officers beating a University of Maryland student after a basketball game. Three of the officers are under criminal investigation.
Washington Post has more here.
This video is from The Washington Post, broadcast April 12, 2010.
Watch this video on iPhone/iPad
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Black couple’s marriage proposal party interrupted multiple times by white security guards accusing them of theft
According to a report at WHEC, a black couple who drove to a park where the man intended to propose were interrupted and harassed three times by security guards who accused them of stealing a T-shirt at a gift shop.
In a Facebook post, Cathy-Marie Hamlet explained that she and her fiancé, Clyde Jackson, were sitting at a table outside the Angry Orchard gift shop when a female security guard approached them and accused Jackson of stealing the shirt and asked to check his pockets.
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"There are only three questions that most Americans want the answer to," Scarborough said. "Was there obstruction, was there collusion and would Donald Trump have been indicted had he not been the president of the United States? Those are three pretty simple questions, but I don't think he'll -- I don't think you'll get the answers tomorrow, sadly."
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Robert Mueller's investigation resulted in convictions for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, along with former national security adviser Mike Flynn and others, but the former FBI director had little authority to hold Russian agents accountable for the crimes he uncovered, wrote cybersecurity analyst Robert Johnson for The Daily Beast.
