A viral video shows a Southern California sheriff’s deputy slamming a teenage girl to the ground during a fight outside a Friday night high school football game, a use of force her mother says sent the 16-year-old to the hospital with injuries to her head and spine.
The video, recorded on a bystander’s cellphone, shows the 16-year-old girl at first struggling with one San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy. Another approaches her from behind and grabs her around her torso. That deputy lifts her up off the ground and slams her backwards to the pavement. The footage shows the teen’s head and back hitting the ground hard as her legs fly up into the air.The department’s news release said the deputy “pulled the female away causing her to land on the ground.
The department alleges the teenager grabbed another deputy’s pepper-ball launcher before the altercation. That deputy had sprayed pepper balls into the crowd to try to get people to disperse, “but the effort was ineffective, and the parties began moving toward the deputy,” the agency said in the news release.“He attacked my daughter from behind,”. “She’s 16 years old. He was a grown man and he attacked my daughter.