Two more Georgetown students are weighing in on the alleged police brutality at Philly Pizza last night.

Ben Wormald (COL ‘11) confirmed Dan Nunn’s account in the earlier post, saying the arrested guy was a Princeton student from DC. He said the police put the student in a chokehold.

“It seemed a little bit disproportionate to whatever he could have done, unless it was a sting operation,” he said. Wormald said that students who complained to MPD officers in the area were asked how many beers they’d had, and threatened with a trip downtown to find out.

After the jump, student Jay Bush’s account. What the arrested guy said is heartbreaking.

Jay Bush was also at Philly Pizza and wrote up an account to send to MPD complaints (bolding and paragraphing mine):

At approximately 1:30 am on Friday, October 10th, three police officers, one female and two males, approached Philadelphia Pizza in a car, licence 4131, and assaulted a male civilian standing in line who did nothing at all to provoke any force. The officers wore navy blue body armour vests that said on the chest and back “POLICE” in white writing over navy blue pants and shirts After trying to provoke him verbally, the two male officers began to push the civilian as he held his hands in surrender, audibly repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did but I’m sorry”. The male officers then forced the civilian against a signpost, seemingly elbowing him in the stomach until one male officer gripped the civilian in a chokehold and forced him hard to his knees and then to his stomach.

Two police in light blue uniforms came around the corner of M and 34th running and joined the initial 3 officers in “subduing” the civilian. The officers then put him in handcuffs with his hands behind his back as he was pleading for them to stop because they had hurt him. The civilian was forced to lie on his stomach, face against the street, for a period of time no less than 10 minutes as the officers conversed over him and attempted to verbally intimidate by standing civilians who were disturbed by the event. Two other police cars arrived at the scene and conversed inaudibly to the first 3 officers before leading the suspect, who was wholly compliant throughout the entire process, into a police car and departing the scene.

The latter two cars departed eventually after allowing students to complain, while they made no attempt to record any statements, and spoke discouragingly to those complaining. One male officer gave his name as Jackson, badge number 303, from the 2nd district. I and what I would estimate to be about 6 other individuals made multiple phone calls to the police to attempt to file reports regarding the incident.

I went down to the MPD 2nd District headquarters this afternoon to check out their arrest log. The arrest doesn’t seem to be recorded there (the closest is a block from the scene, a simple assault), but it might be in the log for this morning since it happened at 2AM.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under News, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.