The owner of the store where Alton Sterling was shot and killed last week is suing police officers with the Baton Rouge Police Department and the city of Baton Rouge for illegal seizure and detainment following the incident, according to a lawsuit filed Monday with the 19th Judicial District Court.
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Prominent “Black Lives Matter” organizer DeRay McKesson strongly defended the movement after a deadly ambush on law enforcement in Dallas that many have linked to anti-police brutality protests.
Video footage showed officers reaching into a crowd and pulling individuals away.
Sterling’s funeral will be held Friday in Baton Rouge. Some 30 to 40 people were taken into custody for trying to block a highway, sheriff’s spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks said. “They illegally took his cell phone”, said Maflahi’s attorney, Joel Porter.
The Justice Department has opened a federal civil rights investigation of Sterling’s death. But any decision on whether to pursue other charges such as murder or negligent homicide or assault would generally come from the state.
Evans, the mother of a 5-year-old boy, traveled to Baton Rouge “because she wanted to look her son in the eyes to tell him she fought for his freedom and rights”, according to R. Alex Haynes, who said on Facebook he had known Evans since childhood.
The district attorney in the case of Sterling announced Monday he is stepping down from the investigation. He cited his professional relationship with the parents of one of the officers involved in the shooting, Blane Salamoni.
Baton Rouge’s top prosecutor is weighing whether to pursue charges against almost 200 demonstrators arrested in weekend protests over the killings of young black men as criticism mounts by protesters over the tactics officers used on the crowds. “Such misconduct violates the constitution and is serving to escalate an environment already filled with tension”.
Kira Marrero, a 22-year-old resident of New Orleans who graduated last year from Williams College in MA, was the first protester freed from Baton Rouge’s jail on Sunday.
The Baton Rouge police spokesman can not comment on pending lawsuit. Twenty-two of them are New Orleans residents, while seven are from Baton Rouge.
That image has swept through social media as a defining moment of protests over recent police killings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota.
Criticism is mounting over how police in Louisiana dealt with throngs of protesters during the weekend, including almost 200 demonstrators who were arrested and may yet face criminal charges.
More than a thousand people left a Black Lives Matter rally in Memphis, Tenn., and walked up a bridge over the Mississippi River on Sunday night, temporarily blocking all traffic on Interstate 40. Paul on Saturday, and hundreds blocked motorists recently on part of Interstate 264 in Portsmouth, Va. Demonstrators have also tried but failed in recent days to block highways in Atlanta and Columbia, S.C.
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Police in riot gear kept protesters from entering Interstate 110 in Baton Rouge on Sunday, thwarting a tactic activists have attempted around in the country in the aftermath of the killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
