Sheriff Leon Lott claims the new video shows the female student hitting Senior Deputy Ben Fields before he pulls her to the ground and drags her across the floor. “I’m looking at what our school resource officer did”, Lott said about the newly-surfaced video.
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In the video, Fields is seen grabbing the girl around the neck and leg and flipping her on the floor while she was still seated on her desk. He walked a fine line, placing blame on both the female student for initiating the incident and Fields for not handling the situation properly.
Lott said that Fields didn’t use “the proper procedures” in removing the student.
“Next, the administrator called Deputy Fields in… he asked, “Will you move?’, and she said, ‘No, I haven’t done anything wrong”, Robinson said. He said the student was asked to leave the class first by a teacher and then a school administrator, who along with another student in the class gave statements to the department in support of Fields.
The second student, Niya Kenny, told WLTX-TV that she felt she had to say something.
However, the sheriff said the student was “responsible for initiating this action”.
But the girl’s lawyer told ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday that she suffered injuries after being “brutally attacked”.
The incident is under investigation by the Columbia field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the bureau’s Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office for the District of South Carolina, the FBI and DOJ confirmed on Tuesday. Videos taken by other students show him standing before the girl, commanding her to stand up or be forcibly removed.
Police say the incident began around 11 a.m. when the girl became disruptive in her algebra class and was texting on her phone. “It’s not what I expect from my deputies”, he said.
The student was charged with disturbing schools and released to her parents.
Regardless, this was the response the police officer decided upon, and would have gotten away with it had he not been filmed by several students who then were fearless enough to upload their videos to social media.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation will decide whether to charge Fields for his actions, Lott said, who noted it was not hard to decide to fire Fields.
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Fields, who also coaches football at the high school, has prevailed against accusations of excessive force and racial bias before.
