Police laughed as they beat my son

Police laughed as they beat my son

by Carol McEldry

On Friday evening, June 28, my daughter and my sister and I went grocery shopping and then to visit our sister at Laguna Honda Hospital. When we returned to our house in Silver Terrace, the whole family pitched in to put up the groceries, leaving the door closed but unlocked.

Suddenly my nephew said the police were at the door. They just walked in, saying somebody had called to report a fight here.

I told them there was no fight, but they wouldn’t leave. “We have to search your house because there might be a dead body inside,” one officer said. They didn’t have a warrant.

Another officer started going through the sheets and towels in my cabinets. When they tried to go into the rest of the house, my son Curtis, 22, and I stood in their way.

A bald headed officer started striking my son. I asked him why, but he never answered. Instead, he called other officers to help him, and six policemen started beating Curtis with their billy clubs and flashlights.

They pulled him down on the floor and handcuffed him face down with his arms behind him. They also put cuffs on his ankles. While he was on the floor, they punched him four times with their fists and kicked him with their boots, and one of them was really hitting him hard with his billy club.

Curtis was shouting, “Mom, mom!” One of the cops told him, “Shut the f--- up!”

Then the policemen said they were going to take Curtis outside to talk to him, but they lied and instead they picked him up by the cuffs on his wrists and ankles and put him in the police car and took him to jail. He is still there today.

At first Curtis was charged with two felonies, which I believe were for assault and resisting arrest, but the charges were soon dropped to misdemeanors after I called the Sheriff’s office. The judge refused to release Curtis on his own recognizance, though, after one of the officers said he had choked a policeman.

The truth is that it was the officers who choked Curtis – two times – so that he couldn’t breathe. I called the station and asked for the police to take my son to San Francisco General so he could be thoroughly checked. A nurse said he didn’t need to go to the doctor, but she admitted he has lots of bruises on his back, side and legs, and his jaw is very sore. When I called her again, she hung up on me.

All those police had no right to just walk in my house. I have two doorbells, and they didn’t ring either one. Within a half hour, there were altogether 25 to 30 officers crowded in my house - beating my son in front of my family, including three small children, and cussing everybody out.

There were two plainclothes officers. One was tall and white with a gray sweater and a plain gray gangster hat. He put his hands on me by pushing me in my back, telling me to get out of my own house. You know he was wrong. My back is still hurting real bad and my chest.

One policeman from car 1063, who was Black, pushed me and said, “Let’s go in the room so we can talk,” meaning a bedroom, but I said no. He saw the other cops beating my son, but no cops stopped the beating.

When they took Curtis to the police station, the same bald headed policeman who had started the beating choked him again. The whole time the police were beating my son, they were laughing.

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