The Desoto, Texas police department released a dashcam video on Monday following pressure from civil rights activists concerned by Sammie Anderson’s claims of police brutality against her family.
Anderson called 911 when her two sons in their 20s got into a tense argument at her home in a Dallas suburb. She called the cops as she was fearful the two might seriously hurt one another.
“It was the worst decision I’ve ever made as a mom,” Anderson told the Dallas Morning News.
Before cops had arrived on the scene on Aug. 7, Anderson’s sons had already stopped arguing.
The dashcam video from one of the patrol cars shows the officers arriving to a quiet scene. Anderson then says to the cops, “No one is fighting.”
The officers draw their Tasers and yell for everyone to get on the ground. The family complies, but as some begin to move around, the officers use force.
When they begin to aggressively handle her sons, Anderson steps in, in fear they would be hurt.
“He is not resisting,” she says.
Anderson’s son was tased repeatedly while already lying on the ground and can be heard screaming in pain.
The video footage shows cops threatening to arrest her for being “a pedestrian in the roadway.”
“It was the worst nightmare I could ever imagine,” she told WFAA.
She said that her four sons have never been in trouble with police before.
“I taught them to always say, ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ to police officers,” Anderson said. “I was always proud that my sons had never been in trouble with the law and I always raised them to stay out of trouble and do their best to be a productive citizen. And respect officers and all of those around them, always.”
She filed a brutality complaint with the police department against the six officers — Courie Bryant, Patrick Krekel, Kendall McGill, Ryan Money, Bryan Scott-Lee and Larry Walker.
Anderson said they falsely arrested two of her sons on charges of interfering with officers and a third on suspicion of domestic violence.
On Tuesday, the police department released a second 911 call. The caller told a dispatcher one of the sons who was arguing had a sledgehammer as a weapon.
“With the information I have and relative to the video you have, our officers acted appropriately to the incident they responded to,” the police chief said.
As a result of the actions of the cops and the arrests, Anderson and her two sons have lost their jobs because of days of work missed while men were in jail.
