A Black college student shown on video being punched and dragged from his car by Florida law enforcement officers during a traffic stop faces a long recovery from injuries that include a concussion and a lip punctured by one of his teeth, his lawyers said on Wednesday.
At a news conference in Jacksonville, 22-year-old William McNeil Jr spoke softly as he made a few brief comments with his family and civil rights attorneys by his side.
“That day I just really wanted to know why I was getting pulled over and why I needed to step out of the car,” he said. “I knew I didn’t do nothing wrong. I was really just scared.”
McNeil is a biology major who played in the marching band at Livingstone College, a historically Black Christian college in Salisbury, North Carolina, the school’s president, Anthony Davis, said.
Footage of the violent arrest has sparked nationwide outrage, with civil rights lawyers accusing authorities of fabricating their arrest report.
The video shows that McNeil was sitting in the driver’s seat, asking to speak to the Jacksonville officers’ supervisor, when they broke his window, punched him in the face, pulled him from the vehicle, punched him again and threw him to the ground.
An officer then delivered six closed-fist punches to the hamstring of his right thigh, police reports show.
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, on Wednesday defended the law enforcement officers and implied the video was posted to advance a “narrative” and generate attention on social media.
“That’s what happens in so many of these things,” DeSantis said. “There’s a rush to judgment. There’s a, there’s a desire to try to get views and clicks by creating division.”
DeSantis said he had not reviewed the viral video of the police encounter.
Body-camera footage of the encounter shows McNeil had been repeatedly told to exit the vehicle. And, though he earlier had his car door open while talking with authorities, he later closed it and appeared to keep it locked for about three minutes before the officers forcibly removed him, the video shows.
The vantage point of the body-camera footage that was released makes it difficult to see the punches that were thrown.
The cellphone footage from the 19 February arrest shows that seconds before being dragged outside, McNeil had his hands up and did not appear to be resisting as he asked, “What is your reason?” He had pulled over and had been accused of not having his headlights on, even though it was daytime, his lawyers said.
On Wednesday, the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said his client had every right to ask why he was being pulled over and to ask for a supervisor.
“America, we’re better than this, we’re at a crossroads,” Crump said. “We are a democracy, we believe in the constitution. We are not a police state where the police can do anything they want to citizens without any accountability.”
Local law enforcement officials have pushed back on some of the claims by Crump, saying the cellphone camera footage from inside the car does not comprehensively capture the circumstances surrounding the incident.
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