| SARASOTA COUNTY — The rough treatment of Juan G. Perez during a recent arrest began before he arrived at the Sarasota County Jail, where a surveillance video recorded an officer kicking the handcuffed man and stepping on him.
Two friends, one a former police officer from North Carolina, say they were waiting to sort out a traffic accident on June 26 when they saw the initial arrest of Perez.
The officer repeatedly punched Perez in the face and pushed his face into the concrete as he tried to handcuff Perez, who was drunk but otherwise calm, said Robin Peters and Ann Marie Locklear on Wednesday.
Perez was not bleeding when the officer arrived, and was too drunk to be fighting back, they said.
“I felt sorry for the suspect,” said Locklear, a former homicide detective from North Carolina who was visiting Sarasota that day. “It appeared to be an excessive use of force.”
Both women thought the officer’s actions seemed wrong, but did not say anything until they saw a surveillance video released this week that shows the officer kicking a handcuffed Perez at the jail later that night.
The officer who made the arrest, Christopher Childers, is on administrative leave during a criminal investigation into his treatment of Perez. The women immediately recognized the mug shot of Perez, 21, as the man they saw arrested.
After Locklear was in a minor wreck on June 26, she and the other driver waited for an officer at the corner of Links Avenue and 2nd Street.
Two security officers were at the same intersection tending to an obviously drunk but relatively quiet Perez who was not bleeding, Locklear said.
Perez seemed so drunk that he could be a danger to himself, Locklear said. “He definitely needed to be arrested, no doubt about that.”
When the officer arrived to deal with Perez, Peters said she watched the officer punch Perez at least twice in the face because Perez was resisting being handcuffed.
“I said, ‘Why is he punching him?’” Peters said. “You could see the policeman was in a rage, you could see he was really upset.”
“It stands out in my mind, vividly, what he was doing.”
Locklear said she saw the blood on Perez’s face when he was put in the back seat of the squad car.
“The bleeding part, I knew that was wrong,” Locklear said.
The two women left after their accident was reported, and they talked about the Perez arrest later that week. They both felt guilty Wednesday that they had not reported it earlier.
“It was pretty awful,” Peters said. “If that was me, and I was drunk too, would they beat the crap out of me too?”
In an affidavit, Childers wrote that he arrived at Second Street and Links Avenue to find Perez waving both arms over his head and “blurting out in Spanish.”
Paramedics had left the area and a security officer was trying to calm down Perez, who was bleeding from the mouth and ears and appeared to be intoxicated, Childers wrote.
Childers said he handcuffed Perez when he refused to stop moving, and Perez moved away, so Childers “redirected the defendant to the grass.”
Sarasota Police spokesman Capt. Lucius Bonner declined comment about the woman’s statements, saying the incident is under investigation.
The women said late Wednesday that they had been contacted by an investigator from the Sarasota Police Department.
Once at the jail, a videotape from about 8 p.m. shows Childers pulling into the sallyport area. He remains in the front seat as Perez shimmies out the squad car’s open back window and falls face-first onto the pavement. The officer walks around the car and stands by Perez.
Minutes later, as Perez is trying to stand up, Childers kicks him twice, apparently in the torso. Perez falls back to the ground and Childers stands with his foot on Perez for five minutes.
While Childers stands with his foot on the inmate’s torso, two other officers walk over to see what is going on and then go about their business.
Childers, a former Army Airborne Ranger who has worked as a detective and on a specialized neighborhood enforcement team, has been an officer since 2000.
Childers has five previous excessive force complaints against him, according to his personnel file. Four of those complaints were found to be unfounded by the Police Department, and one person withdrew her complaint.
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08-04-2009, 03:15 PM
