A U.S. Army officer has sued two Virginia police officers for a December incident captured on camera footage of the body in which police pulled out their weapons and sprayed him.
Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the army, said in a lawsuit filed earlier this month that officers violated their constitutional rights during a traffic stop in the southeastern city of Windsor, about 46 miles away. west of Virginia Beach.
In the footage shared online by The Associated PressYou can see Nazario, who is black and Latin, dressed in uniform and raising his hands as he sits in his car parked at a gas station while officers aim their weapons.
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Officers order Nazario to get out of his vehicle, to which he responds, “Honestly, I’m afraid to get out.”
“Yeah, you should be!” one of the officers may hear say.
According to the AP, Windsor police officer Daniel Crocker broadcast a radio on the station saying he was trying to pull a vehicle with tinted windows that appeared to have no rear license plate.
Crocker reportedly labeled it a “high-risk traffic stop,” as it claimed the driver “evaded police.”
However, Nazario denied that he was trying to escape the officer, at the time he said he was driving from his destination and that he wanted to stop in a well-lit area “for the safety of officers and out of respect for the agents “.
Another officer, Joe Gutierrez, responded to Crocker’s call for help and joined him at the traffic stop.
The lawsuit argued that once officers arrived at the gas station, the SUV’s license plate was clearly visible, but the two officers immediately pulled out their weapons and aimed them at Nazario.
Nazario can be heard in the pictures trying to talk to officers as they repeatedly tell him to get out of the car.
“I have not committed any crime,” the army officer says in the video, to which one of the officers shouts, “You are being stopped for a traffic violation. You are not cooperating and you are under arrest right now. … You are being held for obstruction of justice. ”
After one of the officers tried to open the car door, Gutierrez took a step back and sprayed Nazario several times.
At one point, Gutiérrez can be heard telling Nazario that he was “staring at the lightning,” a reference to the electric chair, and a line from the movie “The Green Mile,” in which a black man s faces execution.
When Nazario finally got out of the vehicle with his eyes closed from the pepper spray, officers forced him to the ground as he repeatedly said, “Please talk to me about what’s going on.”
The lawsuit argued in part that the images captured “behavior consistent with a disgusting national tendency of police officers, who, believing they can operate with complete impunity, engage in unprofessional, rude, racially biased, dangerous abuse of authority. and sometimes deadly ”
Jonathan Arthur, Nazario’s attorney, told the AP that the Army officer graduated from Virginia State University and was commissioned by the school’s ROTC program, adding that “definitely he’s not doing too well ”after the incident with police.
The Hill has contacted the Windsor Police Department for comment.