The Virginia state police reported this Sunday that it is going to open an investigation into an episode that occurred last December when two policemen from the town of Windsor threatened and beat an Afro-Latino soldier after pointing their weapons at him during a traffic control.
One of the two sprayed him with pepper spray.
Caron Nazario, the lieutenant who suffered this police intervention, sued the two agents involved, Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker.
Videos and reports of the event came to light last week
.
[A young black man is shot by police and dies shortly after near Minneapolis. Protests and riots break out]
The city of WIndsor reported that Gutiérrez, who appears in the videos as the one who sprays pepper spray,
is fired after what happened
, and that since January this year the training of city police officers has been improved.
A moment of the police intervention against Lieutenant Caron Nazario in Virginia, captured by the body camera of one of the two agents involved.
Windsor Police
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat,
called the incident "unacceptable" and "dangerous
.
"
The governor of the state, also a Democrat Ralph Northam,
declared himself "angry" by the event
and added that he invited Nazario to discuss how to reform the police.
The military man accused the two WIndsor policemen of violating his constitutional rights.
According to their lawsuit, the recorded videos captured images that show a situation "in line with a disgusting trend in the country of law enforcement agents, who, believing that they can operate with total impunity, commit unprofessional abuses of authority," rude, racially biased, dangerous, and sometimes deadly. "
An Afro-Latino military man files a lawsuit in Virginia against two policemen for abuse of force
April 11, 202100: 26
The two agents described the control they carried out on Nazario, who was driving his car on the highway and was ordered to stop, "high risk."
In addition, they added that he "actively resisted" their guidelines at different times during the exchange.
The videos reflected how
they addressed him phrases such as "should" be scared,
after he declared that that was the reason why he did not want to get out of his car.
["I called the police to report policemen": the shocking testimonies on the second day of the trial for the death of George Floyd]
At one point, Agent Gutierrez told Nazario that he was "
fixin 'to ride the lightning
" [an expression in English that refers to the electric chair and is also pronounced in Milagros Unesperados, a film about a black man who faces execution].
With information from NBC News and AP.