By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and KATE
Last Saturday, just before
midnight, Javier Payne and a friend stood handcuffed outside a hookah store on
a street corner in the Bronx. The teenagers had been arrested, accused of
assaulting a 49-year-old man who refused to give them cigarettes.
At one point Javier, 14,
shouted an obscenity at a nearby police sergeant.
Then, officials and witnesses
said, the sergeant grabbed Javier and pushed him hard against the window of the
hookah store, shattering the glass and badly cutting Javier’s head and body.
Witnesses and officials said it
did not appear that the sergeant intended for the glass to break. Regardless,
the episode has become the first serious accusation of police brutality since
Commissioner William J. Bratton took over with a mandate to improve the image
of the department.
On Saturday, a week after the
episode, Javier, in a wheelchair and with a white bandage on his head, appeared
with family members and city officials at a news conference led by the Rev. Al
Sharpton, who pledged to “monitor and pursue this case.”
“I don’t care what he said,”
Mr. Sharpton said at the news conference, a police officer “does not shove a
handcuffed child.”
“If you are so agitated that
you can shove a handcuffed child out of anger, you ought not be on the police
department,” he told about 100 people at the headquarters of his National
Action Network in Harlem.
The sergeant, whom the
department did not identify, has been given a desk assignment while the
Internal Affairs Bureau and the Bronx district attorney’s office conduct an
investigation, a police department spokesman said. No other officers present at
the arrest are under scrutiny, the spokesman said.
Authorities said that Javier
and his friend, who was not identified, were walking in the vicinity of East
189th Street and Arthur Avenue in the west Bronx when they saw the 49-year-old
man and asked for a cigarette. The man later told investigators that when he
refused and turned to walk away, one of the boys punched him in the head and
another hit him with a backpack before running off. He suffered minor injuries.
The man flagged down a patrol
car and went with officers to find the boys, the authorities said. Officers
found them inside the Hookah Spot at 2491 Arthur Avenue, and arrested them on
the victim’s identification.
The sergeant arrived after the
boys had been handcuffed and were standing on the sidewalk, the authorities
said. Leonard Goodwin, 40, who was watching from across the street, said he saw
the sergeant conferring with Javier, who was standing against the storefront window.
As the sergeant turned to walk away, Javier shouted an obscenity, Mr. Goodwin
said. The sergeant turned around, grabbed the back of Javier’s neck with one
hand, and pushed him into the glass.
“It wasn’t done like he was
trying to throw a kid through the window,” Mr. Goodwin said. “It was like a
freak accident.”
“The sergeant’s face changed,”
he added. “Everyone got scared.”
Cesar Rizo, a 22-year-old
recent college graduate, said he saw Javier covered in blood as police officers
held paper towels to his wounds. Mr. Rizo said he heard Javier say: “I can’t
breathe. I’m going to pass out.”
At the news conference on
Saturday, speakers acknowledged that Javier’s arrest was most likely justified.
He and his friend were charged with resisting arrest, obstructing government
administration and assault. They will appear before the Bronx Family Court.
But many also called for swift
punishment of the sergeant. Jumaane D. Williams, a City Councilman from
Brooklyn, said the case would test the department’s commitment to reining in
the kind of heavy-handed behavior that critics say became a hallmark under Mr.
Bratton’s predecessor, Raymond W. Kelly.
“The time has come to show the
difference between this new administration and the previous one,” Mr. Williams
said.
Javier, who did not speak at
the news conference, lifted his shirt to reveal a gash held shut with stitches.
Javier also had a cut on his forehead and a stablike wound to his chest, where
glass penetrated his lung, his lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, said.
A senior police department
official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was
continuing, said the police were viewing surveillance video of the episode. The
official said it was clear Javier was being “verbally belligerent.”
But, he added, it was “pretty
clear” that the sergeant “did something wrong.”