Civil rights lawyers are suing police and school district in Key West over their arrest of a screaming 8-year-old boy who allegedly hit a teacher
KEY WEST, Fla. Civil rights lawyers on Tuesday put the police and school district in Key West in custody over their treatment of an 8-year-old boy with special needs who was handcuffed, booked and briefly imprisoned on a criminal battery charge after he was accused of punching of a teacher who tried to discipline him for sitting incorrectly in the cafeteria for schools.
A video from the body-cam of the child of the arrest of the child shows officers shaking the handcuffs of the child and putting on the snoring child before he took him to the prison, where his mom said his mouth was swabbed for DNA, his mugshot and fingerprints were taken, and he was briefly locked up in a cell.
The lawsuit filed by Tallahassee attorney Benjamin Crump accused city and school administrators of bringing police to a school institution without training or specific policies for the arrests of students – disabled children in particular. As a result, officers showed “conscious indifference” to what should be treated as a behavioral problem, he said.
‘Where’s the shape? Where is humanity? This is child of one, “Crump said at an online news conference with the boy’s mother, Bianca N. Digennaro.
Key West Police Chief Sean T. Brandenburg said Monday in a statement that his officers did nothing wrong: “Based on the report, standard administrative procedures were followed,” he said.
The Monroe County School District said it could not comment because of the legal action.
The boy’s mother and lawyer said he suffers from ADHD, depression, anxiety and oppositional defense disorder, and took two forms of medication that day in December 2018. Digennaro said it took eight months before prosecutors agreed to no longer prosecute. She had to go to court several times and pay for an expensive forensic evaluation in defense of her son.
“I refused to have him convicted at the age of 8,” said Digennaro, who was in the hospital on the day of the incident. I was not there to protect my son from being arrested, to an adult prison, to get fingerprints, to swipe his mouth for DNA and to get a mouse shot, ‘she said.
Crump has a growing list of clients who accuse police of abuse, including the family of George Floyd, the Black man who died in May at the hands of a Minneapolis officer.
The Miami Herald reported that the incident at Grace Adams Elementary School began when the boy was not sitting properly on his cafeteria bench seat, and a teacher asked him several times to sit out of concern for his safety.
According to the School Resource Officer’s arrest report Michael Malgrat, who received the newspaper, the teacher then told the boy to sit next to her, and he refused, saying, “Do not put your hands on me.” Then she told him to run with her, and the boy said, “My mother will strike you,” and stabbed her with his right hand.
The court case says the teacher did not complain of injury.
Malgrat, who was sitting in the school’s administrative office when the teacher and the boy arrived, wrote that the boy “clapped his hands in fists and that he posed as if he was ready to fight.” Two more officers were called, and they read to him in a hall before reserving him in the juvenile justice facility of Key West on a criminal battery charge.
The video footage shows officers telling the sobbing boy that he ‘is going to jail. ‘They refresh him and then give him the feeling of metal handcuffs, which were too big for his wrists.
‘You understand that this is very serious, OK? I hate that you had to put me in this position to do this. The thing is, you made a mistake. Now is the time to learn from it and grow out of it, not to repeat the same mistake again, ”says one of the officers as they escort him out.
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