Six months to the day after unarmed teenager Michael Brown Jr. was killed by then-Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, seven protesters – including one 14-year-old boy and a woman in a wheelchair – were arrested by Ferguson police on Monday night.
“They tried to say I hit them with my cell phone holder. I am a pacifist. I have never hit anyone in my whole life,” said Heather De Mian, 44, a wheelchair-bound protestor and livestreamer.
After a candlelight vigil on Canfield Drive to mark six months since the fatal shooting, several activists moved toward the nearby Ferguson Police Department to demonstrate. The majority of the protestors, including those arrested, were across the street from the station, in the parking lot of Andy Wurm’s Tire & Wheel and on the adjoining sidewalk. The parking lot has served as a designated site for protests since the owners gave permission for demonstrators to congregate there.
In a cell phone video that protestor Keith Rose showed The Huffington Post, De Mian is out of her wheelchair and sitting on the ground as police officers arrest her. “Please keep filming this, Keith,” she says on the video.
Some protestors said police dragged De Mian out of her wheelchair, but De Mian does not recall the exact moment.
“I don’t even know how I got out of my wheelchair. I don’t know if I fell or if I was pulled, but I was on the ground when (a police officer) hit me with my cell phone and knocked my glasses off,” De Mian told HuffPost.
For the majority of her three-hour stint in jail, she was unaware of the charges against her, De Mian said. “I demanded at least 20 different times to know what my charges were when I was in there,” she said, noting she feels she was targeted because she was livestreaming the protest.
Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson assisted in De Mian’s early release.
The night’s list of detainees also included another person with a camera, 34-year-old Christopher Phillips, who was charged with disorderly conduct. He says he was on the sidewalk filming multiple arrests on Andy Wurm’s Tire & Wheel parking lot when he was arrested.
“They didn’t tell me anything. I wasn’t breaking the law. I didn’t commit a crime. They didn’t give me a name. They didn’t read my rights,” Phillips told HuffPost.
Phillips said his head was slammed down on the hood of a police SUV, and his $20,000 camera was treated carelessly during his arrest. “They were trying to throw me in the car so quick, and I had to yell to them that my belt clip is hooked to the camera,” he said.
Phillips was having problems getting his camera monitor to work after his release. “Of the eight months I’ve had this camera, I never had this issue,” Phillips told HuffPost.
He tweeted that he suspected police had tampered with his camera “because my footage would incriminate them for tonight’s actions.”
The Ferguson Police Department did not immediately return a request for comment on its treatment of Phillips’ equipment.
Phillips, who lives on Canfield Drive, said the arrests illustrated the need for reform within the Ferguson Police Department.
“Change hasn’t come,” he said. “I’m tired of going to community meetings. People want to talk about how this makes them feel, and they’ve had six months to do that. The action needs to come now. What happened tonight shouldn’t have happened.”
This story was published as part of a partnership between The St. Louis American and The Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com.
