A U.S. Army officer has sued two Virginia police officers over an incident in December that was captured on camera footage in which police pulled out their guns and sprayed him with pepper spray.
Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the Army, said in a lawsuit earlier this month that officers violated his constitutional rights during a traffic stop in the southeastern city of Windsor, about 70 miles west of Virginia Beach.
In the footage shared online by The Associated PressNazario, who is black and Latino, can be seen dressed in his uniform and holding his hands up while sitting in his parked car at a gas station while officers point their guns at him.
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Officials ordered Nazario to get out of his vehicle, to which he responded, “I’m honestly scared to get out.”
“Yes, it must be you!” one of the officers he can hear say.
According to the APWindsor police officer Daniel Crocker told the station he was trying to pull over a vehicle with tinted windows that apparently did not have a rear license plate.
Crocker reportedly described it as a ‘high risk stop’, as he claimed the driver was ‘evading the police’.
Nazario, however, denied that he tried to escape from the officer, but rather said at the time that he had driven home from his service station and wanted to stop in a well-lit environment “for the safety of the officer and out of respect for the officers. “
Another officer, Joe Gutierrez, responded to Crocker’s call for help and kept him at the stop.
The lawsuit alleges that as soon as officers arrived at the gas station, the license plate on the SUV was clearly visible, but the two officers immediately drew their guns and pointed to Nazario.
Nazario can be heard in the footage trying to talk to the officers as they repeatedly tell him to get out of the car.
“I did not commit any crime,” the army officer said in the video, in which one of the officers shouted, “you are being stopped for a traffic offense. You are not cooperating, and you are currently under arrest. … You are being held for obstruction of justice. ‘
After one of the officers wanted to open the car door, Gutierrez then stepped back and sprayed Nazario several times with pepper spray.
At one point, Gutierrez can be heard telling Nazario that he was ‘driving lightning’, a reference to the electric chair and a line from the movie ‘The Green Mile’, in which a black man is executed .
As Nazario finally leaves the vehicle with his eyes clamped from the pepper spray, officers force him to the ground while repeatedly saying, “Please talk to me about what’s going on.”
The lawsuit partially argued that the footage “captured behavior in line with a disgusting nationwide tendency of law enforcement officers, who believe they can act completely unpunished and engage in unprofessional, reckless, racially biased, dangerous and sometimes fatal abuses of authority.”
Jonathan Arthur, the lawyer for Nazario, told the AP that the Army officer graduated from Virginia State University and was commissioned by the school’s ROTC program, adding that he was “certainly not doing too well” after the incident with the police.
The Hill reached the Windsor Police Department for comment.