Six Atlanta officers are charged with using excessive force after dramatic body camera video showed them dragging two terrified black college students from a car and tasering them
Six Atlanta police officers have been criminally charged after a dramatic body camera video showed them dragging a young black couple from a car during George Floyd protests.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard announced the charges during a news conference this morning.
'I feel a little safer now that these monsters are off the street and no longer able to terrorize anyone else,' said Messiah Young, who was pulled from the vehicle along with his girlfriend, Taniyah Pilgrim, while they were caught in traffic on Saturday.
Fired and charged: These undated photos show Atlanta PD investigators Mark Gardner (left) and Ivory Streeter (right), who were fired on Sunday and charged with aggravated assault on Tuesday over accusations they used excessive force during the arrest of two college students
Taniyah Pilgrim holds Messiah Young's bandaged hand as he speaks during a news conference on the campus of Morehouse College on Monday about being pulled from his car and tasered
In this photo taken from police body camera video released by the Atlanta Police Department, an officer points his handgun at Young while the college student is seated in his vehicle
The incident first gained attention from video online and on local news. Throughout, the couple can be heard screaming and asking officers what is happening.
Two of the officers, Investigator Ivory Streeter and Investigator Mark Gardner, were fired on Sunday.
Streeter and Gardner are both charged with aggravated assault. Two others are also charged with aggravated assault, while one is charged with aggravated battery. Some of the officers are also charged with criminal damage to property as well as pointing or aiming a gun.
Officer Lonnie Hood was charged with two counts of aggravated assault and one count of simple battery; Officer Willie Sauls was charged with aggravated assault and criminal damage to property; Officer E. Armond Jones was charged with aggravated battery and pointing or aiming a gun; and Officer F. Ronald Claud was charged with criminal damage to property.
They have until June 5 to turn themselves in to police. Each of the officers has been granted a $10,000 signature bond.
Streeter was hired in December 2003 and Gardner in August 1997. Training records from the Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, which certifies law enforcement officers in Georgia, show that both officers had recently completed training in use of force and in deescalation tactics.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said Pilgrim was released without charges. She said Young, was released, too, and she's ordering the charges against him dropped.
Young and Pilgrim were driving to get food when they got caught in traffic during protests and had a run-in with police
The video shows Pilgrim in the passenger seat screaming in terror as an officer aims a Taser at her and deploys it
The woman repeatedly screams that she is coming out, but she gets tasered anyway and then pulled out of the car by police
She didn't specify what charges he faced. A police report says Young was charged with attempting to elude police and driving with a suspended license.
Dramatic body-camera video released by police on Sunday shows a group of officers shouting orders, smashing the driver´s side window, deploying stun guns and pulling Pilgrim and Messiah Young from the sedan. Throughout, the couple can be heard screaming and asking officers what is happening.
The video begins with police taking another young man into custody in a downtown street alongside a line of stopped cars. The man is pleading with police to let him go, saying he didn't do anything.
Young, sitting in the driver's seat of a car stopped in the street holds up his phone, appearing to shoot video as an officer approaches and pulls the driver's side door open.
Young pulls the door shut and says repeatedly, 'I'm not dying today.' He urges the officers to release the other man and let him get in the car as the dark sedan advances a bit.
Atlanta police officers on Saturday surrounded a vehicle driven by a college student with his girlfriend in the passenger seat
The shocking footage showed officers smash the driver's side window and use a Taser on Young, a 22-year-old student attending Morehouse College
Pilgrim was taken out of the car and made to lay down on the pavement, where officers used zip-ties to bind her hands
The car advances and gets stuck in traffic and officers run up to both sides of the car shouting orders. An officer uses a stun gun on Pilgrim in the front passenger seat as she's trying to get out of the car and then officers pull the screaming woman from the vehicle.
Another officer yells at Young to put the car in park and open the window. An officer repeatedly hits the driver´s side window with a baton, and another finally manages to break it. Officers also slashed the tires, the young couple say.
As the window glass shatters, an officer uses a stun gun on Young and officers pull him from the car as officers shout, 'Get your hand out of your pockets,' and, 'He got a gun. He got a gun. He got a gun.' Once he´s out and on the ground, officers zip tie his hands behind his back and lead him away.
Police reports do not list a gun as having been recovered.
'There is no justification, none whatsoever, for what they did to them and for what the system did to them,' Young's lawyer Mawuli Davis said, later adding, 'If there was a gun, best believe this would have had a very different outcome.'
In incident reports, Streeter wrote that he used his 'electronic conductive weapon' on the driver and Gardner wrote that he deployed his Taser 'to bring the female passenger under control.'
'I'm so happy that they´re being held accountable for their actions,' Pilgrim said at a news conference on Monday.
Young, 22, of Chicago, is a rising senior at Morehouse, where he's studying business management. Pilgrim, 20 - from San Antonio, Texas - is a psychology major at Spelman College. Both schools are historically black colleges near downtown Atlanta.
Young suffered a fractured arm and required 20 stitches. He said the arrest was 'one of the hardest things that I've ever experienced in my life.'
Pilgrim, a psychology major at Spelman College, said of her and Young's ordeal: 'we felt like we were going to die in that car'
The two were out getting something to eat Saturday night when they got snarled in traffic along Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, their lawyers said. A friend of theirs, another Morehouse student, was standing in the street talking to them while they were stopped when police began to take him into custody, Young's lawyer Davis said.
Young used his phone to film what was happening and that's when officers turned on him, Davis said, adding he believes the officers' motivation was to keep his client from capturing what was going on.
'I still can't even process what happened,' Pilgrim said at the news conference. 'We felt like we were going to die in that car.'
L. Chris Stewart, an attorney representing Pilgrim, said they intend to file a lawsuit, saying cities often don't make changes until they have to start writing checks.
'We want change in policies, in procedures, in laws,' Stewart said. 'It's not hard to fix.'
Mayor Bottoms said at a news conference Sunday after reviewing body camera footage that she and police Chief Erika Shields decided to immediately fire Streeter and Gardner, and place three others on desk duty pending investigation.
'Use of excessive force is never acceptable,' Bottoms told reporters. Shields called the footage 'really shocking to watch.'
Six Atlanta officers are charged with using excessive force after dramatic body camera video showed them dragging two terrified black college students from a car and tasering them
![Six Atlanta officers are charged with using excessive force after dramatic body camera video showed them dragging two terrified black college students from a car and tasering them]()
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June 03, 2020
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