---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Badri Raina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sep 24, 2007 11:53 PM Subject: Re: student tasered To: Sudhir Devadas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1984? ----- Original Message ----- *From:* Sudhir Devadas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *To:* Badri Raina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Cc:* Mundoli Narayanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Sent:* Monday, September 24, 2007 5:45 PM *Subject:* student tasered http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/09/2007091805n.htm Today's News Tuesday, September 18, 2007 U. of Florida Police Subdue Student With Taser at Speech by Sen. Kerry By SARA LIPKA University of Florida police officers subdued a student with a Taser stun gun on Monday afternoon during a speech by Sen. John F. Kerry. The student, Andrew Meyer, had raucously questioned Senator Kerry, then resisted a police escort out of the auditorium, in an incident recorded on video. Mr. Meyer, 21, had approached an open microphone toward the end of the speech and demanded that the senator explain why he did not challenge the results of the 2004 presidential election and seek to impeach President Bush, according to The Gainesville Sun. Senator Kerry, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said there was insufficient evidence that the election had been stolen for him to pursue such a challenge. He also urged the student and the audience to calm down, said the localnewspaper. Mr. Meyer continued his questioning, asking the senator whether he was a member of Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale University to which many prominent political figures have belonged. At that point,the microphone in the aisle of the auditorium was turned off, and police officers tried to remove Mr. Meyer. The video shows Mr. Meyer, wearing a blue-collared shirt, jumping and flailing his arms, trying to wriggle out of the officers' grasp. He shouts, "They're arresting me for nothing!" and "Get off of me! What did I do? Help! Help!" Six officers wrestle him to the floor in the back of the auditorium as Senator Kerry continues speaking. "I'll answer his question," the senator says. "Unfortunately he's not available to come up here and swear me in as president." In the video, an officer warns the student, still pinned to the floor, that if he continues resisting, he will be "tased." The video concludes with Mr. Meyer's cries of pain and students' calls of police brutality. Sponsors of the event, a town-hall forum, had summoned officers to remove Mr. Meyer from the building, according to a written statement from the campus police department. The officers used the Taser because Mr. Meyer disregarded orders and physically resisted arrest, the statement said. The police charged him with disrupting a school assembly and resisting arrest with violence. They took him to the Alachua County jail. The university will investigate the incident as it does any case of a police officer using force, said Stephen F. Orlando, a campus spokesman. "There is going to be an internal investigation to determine whether the officers followed procedure and acted appropriately," he said. Mr. Orlando expected that process to take three days. A similar investigation at the University of California at Los Angeles -- where campus police turned a Taser on a student who refused to show his ID in a campus library -- found that the officers had used "excessive force and poor judgment." A lawsuit by the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, is scheduled to go to trial next year. Mr. Meyer, a telecommunication major, brought a video camera to the event at the University of Florida and handed it to the person next to him when he got up to speak, Mr. Orlando said. "It appeared that whatever he was going to do, he wanted to document on video." Some students at Florida are planning a "march against police brutality" at noon today. The students are demanding that the university police drop all charges against Mr. Meyer, suspend the officers involved in his arrest, and remove all Tasers from the campus, said Krissy Abdullah, a junior who is coordinating the protest, with support from Students for a Democratic Society. Ms. Abdullah said she was shocked and angered by the police officers' response to Mr. Meyer's conduct. "He was definitely acting a little out of line, but I think that they definitely escalated it way too fast," she said. "Someone made the point that he wasn't disrupting the educational event; he was the educational event." The Facebook group "Gators for Andrew Meyer" had drawn more than 200 members by Monday evening. "Part of me feels bad for you ... but part of me can't help but laugh," Chris Newman, a junior at Florida, posted on the site. "Ur a character," he said. "Stick it to the man bro!!" Andrew Mytelka contributed to this report. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
