Two police officers in Texas have been fired after they were caught on video beating a woman who was being arrested for an unpaid traffic ticket.
In an interview with KBMT last week, 25-year-old Keyarika "Shea" Diggles said that Jasper Officer Ricky Grissom was polite at first, allowing her to call her mother from the police station to raise the $150 needed to pay the fine.
But Grissom eventually became impatient and cut off the call.
"He said, 'I've been waiting here all this time when I could have been out patrolling, waiting on you. This is stupid,'" Diggles recalled. "He just went to cussing. And then I was like, 'Well, you don't have to yell at me.'"
Video obtained from the Jasper Police Department shows Grissom pushing Diggles up against a wall before Officer Ryan Cunningham comes from behind and slams her head against a counter top. Diggles is then forced to the ground and dragged by her ankle into a nearby cell.
"The amount of force used was abominable," attorney Cade Bernsen, who is representing Diggles, told Yahoo News. "She got her hair pulled out, broke a tooth, braces got knocked off... it was brutal."
On Monday, the Jasper City Council dismissed Grissom and Cunningham. A charge of resisting arrest against Diggles was also dropped.
In a famous 1998 case, an African-American man named James Byrd Jr. died after being tied to the back of a pickup drug and dragged and decapitated by at least two white supremacists in Jasper. And in last year, the city's first African-American police chief, Rodney Pearson, was fired by the majority-white city council. He is now suing.
"It’s a different part of the world, man, it’s crazy," Bernsen explained to Yahoo News.
Watch this video from KBMT, broadcast May 29, 2013.
12 News KBMT and K-JAC. News, Weather and Sports for SE Texas
Watch this video, uploaded to YouTube on June 3, 2013.
