Two years after Key West police arrested her screaming 8-year-old at his elementary school, Bianca Digennaro has filed a lawsuit against the city of Florida and the school district, accusing authorities of ‘traumatizing’ her son over a ‘temper tantrum’.
The federal civil lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, describes the December 2018 arrest of Digennaro’s 8-year-old son, who has special needs, after allegedly beating a teacher during an eruption.
Footage from body cameras of the arrest, which went viral on social media this week, shows officers trying to handcuff the child and tell him he ‘is going to jail.’ Officials then read the boy, escorted him out of school, and eventually booked him into the juvenile justice facility of Key West on a criminal battery charge. Nine months later, a prosecutor dismissed the prosecutors.
“The authorities tried to make him a criminal,” Digennaro told a news conference Tuesday. “I’m here for my son because I refuse to let him be sentenced to justice at age 8 because he had a mental break-in.”
The lawsuit filed by The Daily Beast – which names the city of Key West, the three officers who arrested the child, several administrators at Gerald Adams Elementary, and the Monroe County School District as suspects – seeks compensatory and punitive damages. The case is also seeking a statement of judgment that the child’s rights were violated, “a written admission of the charges,” and an apology for the incident.
“This is a heartbreaking example of how our education and policing systems train children to be criminals by treating them as criminals,” said Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer representing Digennaro. ‘If convicted, the child, in this case, would have been a convicted felon at the age of eight. This little boy was failed by everyone who took part in this horrific incident. ”
In the lawsuit, it states December 14, 2018, incident at Gerald Adams Elementary began when Ashley Henriquez, a teacher, saw that the child had “refused to sit well on a couch” while eating lunch.
Digennaro said Tuesday that her son has several emotional and behavioral disorders, including ADHD, depression, anxiety, and Oppositional Defiance Disorder and Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Disturbance of Emotional Conduct. But despite having an individualized educational program, the school dropped out on Dec. 14. The 8-year-old with a substitute teacher “who had no awareness or worries about his needs.”
When the child refused to comply with Henriquez’s requests to sit properly, she asked him to come next to her. The child refused, at which point the teacher tried to “physically move” him. When Henriquez told ‘not to lay her hands on him’, the boy then stabbed her ‘in the chest,’ according to the lawsuit.
Score resource officer Michael Malgrat’s arrest report, which was obtained by the Miami Herald, says Henriquez took the boy to the school’s administrative office, where Malgrat said he “had clasped his hands in fists and was stealing as if he was ready to fight.”
The lawsuit alleges that two other officers – Kenneth Waite and Fred Sims – were “called to school.” “In an attempt to teach [the boy] a lesson, despite knowing it [the boy] was not ‘to jail’ (in the general sense of that statement) ‘,’ the three officers’ led ‘the 8-year-old intentionally to believe’ he went to jail. ‘
‘That you know where you’re going? You’re going to jail. That you should get up and put your hands behind your back, ‘one of the officers told the child, according to the lawsuit.
In the film of the body-cam, the officers can be seen telling the grieving child that he will be ‘in jail’ before they freeze him and try metal shackles to place his small arms. But because the handcuffs were too large for the boy’s wrists, officials told him instead to ‘run with his hands in front of him.’ In the video, the visibly overwhelmed boy can be heard calling to his father – who was still in the building.
‘You understand that this is very serious, OK? And I hate that you put me in this position that I have to do this. OK? All right? The thing is, you’ve made a mistake, now it’s time to learn from it and grow out of it. Right? Do not repeat the same error. OK? Okay, ‘states one of the officers, according to the lawsuit and the camera footage.
The boy was escorted out of the building and into a marked patrol car. Digennaro said Tuesday that nine months after the incident, prosecutors were dropped against her son – after a second prosecutor was assigned to the case and determined it was ‘ridiculous’.
“As a direct result of the behavior of the defenders, [the boy] suffering from a psychological injury that manifests itself physically, that is, loss of breathing, burns, stomach pain, headaches, insomnia, nightmares, and refusing to sleep alone, ”states the process.
In a statement, Chief West Police Chief Sean T. Brandenburg claimed that his office did nothing wrong during the incident, and “based on the report, standard administrative procedures were followed.” A police spokesman also declined to comment on the status of the investigation because it involved a minor.
A Monroe County School District spokesman also declined to comment on the lawsuit as an incident.
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