Err on the side that most cops are not good either implicitly or by conformance. And this story is a perfect example. A “good” cop attempts to get a bad cop off the hook by threatening to charge a child with a felony.
A White State Trooper’s Violent Encounter with Two Black Teens Results in No Charges and Many Questions – INDY Week
A state highway patrol trooper and his fiancée have been accused of assaulting two Black teenagers, holding one at gunpoint while the other was bashed in the back of the head with a police-issued walkie talkie, according to a complaint filed against the NC Department of Safety.
Two Raleigh attorneys filed the complaint last week. It accuses NC State Highway Patrol trooper Sgt. Sean Luther Bridges and Leann Weber, who are white, of assaulting the teens while they were visiting a home their mother had under contract for purchase in Wendell.
On September 10, just after 6:00 p.m., the teens left their father’s house on Old Johnson Road to visit their future home at 157 Terracotta Way, which was still under construction. The attorneys say Bridges, a resident of the neighborhood, was not in uniform and did not identify himself as a law enforcement officer when he prevented Xavier Atkinson, then 14, from leaving the premises.
The attorneys say Bridges also threw Xavier’s 19-year-old sister, Mahogany, in a ditch, handcuffed her, and held her at gunpoint when she tried to intervene. Weber, Bridges’ fiancée, bashed Xavier Atkinson in the back of the head with Bridges’ police-issued walkie talkie, according to the complaint.
The teens’ mother, Beth Harris, is a mental health nurse at the UNC Health Care Addiction Treatment Center at WakeBrook in Raleigh. She is “200 percent sure” racism fueled Bridges’ behavior and said her children would not have been subjected to that type of mistreatment if they were white.
“Never, never,” she told the INDY. “They thought because they were African American children that they were in the house stealing. The Johnston County Sheriff’s Office even went over to their aunt’s house and searched the home to see if they had stolen something.”
The Johnston County deputies did not find any stolen items, but in the sometimes-illogical world of law enforcement reasoning, the Atkinson children were still threatened with charges of assault on a law enforcement official.
In an 18-page claim for damages filed July 23, Raleigh attorneys Donald Huggins and James Hairston assert that the state department of public safety deployed an African American Highway Patrol trooper, First Sgt. D.L. Mobley, to empathize with Harris “as a fellow African American.” Mobley told Harris that he did not want to see Mahogany charged, because he knew how a criminal record could hinder a young Black woman.
Huggins and Hairston say Mobley might have identified with Harris, but they also think his actual intent was to cover up the incident. In essence, Mobley dangled a quid pro quo before Harris, said Huggins and Hairston. If the teen’s mother “dropped the issue against Bridges’ wife, then Mahogany Atkinson and Xavier Atkinson would not be [criminally] charged,” the claim says.
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