Denver Cop Leg-Sweeps 7-Month-Pregnant Woman to Ground Bellyfirst While Beating Her Boyfriend's Head into Asphalt. Drug War is Working!
Denver cops think they see a guy, David Flores, swallowing a sock they think contains illegal drugs. Fearful for his safety, they say—he might choke!—and fearful for officer safety—one of them had his arm pinned under Flores' body smashed to the ground!—they beat his head into the asphalt.
His 7-month-pregnant girlfriend Mayra Lazos-Guerrero shouts at them to stop and approaches them, gets legswept into the asphalt herself, face and belly first.
Passerby Levi Frasier videos it all, cops take his tablet and apparently try to erase the evidence, though he tells local TV station Fox 31 that he recovered it when syncing later to cloud. Frasier admits it's possible that both he and the officer somehow missed it and that perhaps it was there all along.
Still:
Frasier said, officers on scene threatened him with arrest, demanded he turn over all photos and videotape to them and then seized his tablet over his objections.
"When he took it, I said, 'Hey! You can't do that. You need a warrant for that!' and he said, 'What program did you take the video with? Where is that?'" Frasier said.
He said police ignored his objections and dug through his personal photos without obtaining a court order.
"The first officer that comes up to ask me about my witness statement brings me to the police car and says we could do this the easy way or we could do this the hard way," Fraser said. "It was taken as 'You can either cooperate and give us what we want or we're going to incarcerate you.'"
Although official police reports mentioned an officer thought Frasier took video, there is nothing written about taking, searching or possessing his tablet. That's something Frasier swears occurred.
Frasier tells Fox 31 that even in his days cage fighting he never saw such hard punches as Flores was suffering. (It's on the video.)
Great video report from Fox 31, well worth watching, including the brave takedown of the pregnant lady:
Flores now faces two felony drug charges. Lazos-Guerrero is now herself facing charges, including child abuse, since a child was in the car when Flores and Lazos-Guerrero were physically abused by police.
The report from local Fox 31 is really refreshing, particularly an exchange between anchors at the end containing these bits of advice: "If there's one takeaway for the viewer—if you're in public and see something happening and it's in public you can vidoetape it and no one can do anything about that…you don't have to listen to police when they say turn it over if they don't have a search warrant."
[Hat tip: Free Thought Project.]
