A video caught a high school resource officer threatening to shoot a student because he was leaving school.
Last month, the mother of a student uploaded a video to Facebook, showing her child being held at gunpoint during an attempt to leave school following a verbal altercation with a resource officer outside River Ridge High School in Florida. In the video, you can see the student driving in a Port Richey pickup truck as the officer and another person, who was identified as school disciplinary assistant Carol Bond, start to block him. Bond and the officer then stopped the student, saying he was committing truancy. The video footage came from the officer’s body camera.
“If you’re not holding me, then get the hell out of my way,” the student said, to which Bond responded, “You’re truant.” The student then tried to drive the car around the resource officer’s vehicle, but the officer yelled, “You’re gonna get shot if you come another fucking foot closer to me,” the officer threatened. “You run into me, you’ll get fucking shot… This is my campus, brother.” Later in the video, Bond, who is a white woman, said the student called her the n-word, but the student denied saying it in the video. “I didn’t say that. You’re being hella racist by saying that,” said the student.
On Monday, Steve Hegarty, a spokesperson for Pasco Schools and former Tampa Police spokesman, spoke to Vice News about the incident, saying it could have been treated with better care. “We felt that the situation could have been handled better,” said Hegarty. He added that there was “more that happened” that wasn’t shown in the body cam footage. “The employee has been counseled on how it could have been handled better.”
The student’s mother, Nedra Miller, told the Tampa Bay Times on Friday that she had informed the school weeks prior that her son had an orthodontist appointment but went to school in the morning to drop off a friend. The student was first suspended and then expelled, but his mother is appealing the school’s decision. “I just feel like if they were all acting like children, and my son received that level of discipline. They should, too,” Miller explained to the Times. “They should both be removed from their jobs.”
“All three were acting like children, and all three are wrong,” Miller said. “But the cop more so. He’s just flat-out not OK to be around children. I was shocked that an officer of the law working with children would speak to my son that way.” Vice News reports the officer is still reportedly working at the school.
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