Robby Soave
Police charged a New Jersey man
with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, but recently revealed footage from
a dashboard camera told a different story: Not only did the officers start
beating the man for no apparent reason, but they actually crashed one of their
vehicles into the man’s car.
Then they allegedly lied about
what transpired and suppressed the evidence, but were somehow found innocent
during an internal investigation.
Prosecutors, however, dropped
all charges against 30-year-old Marcus Jeter, a black man, once they saw the
incredible video footage, which fully corroborates Jeter’s side of the story.
Jeter’s nightmare began when
Bloomfield police pulled him over on the highway. Police claimed that Jeter
eluded them, even though the footage clearly shows him pulling over promptly.
One of the officer’s approached
Jeter’s vehicle with his gun raised, and pointed it directly in Jeter’s face.
Another officer was carrying a shotgun in the altercation.
“I was afraid that I might get
shot,” said Jeter in an interview with WABC.
What happened next was so crazy
that Jeter’s lawyer didn’t believe it–until he saw the footage for himself.
Another cop car responded to the scene and crashed right into Jeter’s vehicle.
This detail was not mentioned at all in the police report, and the officers
pretended like it never happened–until the video contradicted them.
Next, the footage clearly shows
Jeter raising his hands in the air, initiating no violence against the
officers. The cops respond by punching him repeatedly, all while yelling at
him, “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!”
Jeter was not resisting in the
slightest. And yet he was eventually charged with eluding arrest, resisting
arrest and assaulting an officer. Prosecutors offered him a plea deal of 5
years in prison, according to Watchdog Wire.
Thankfully, local reporters
were able to dig up the video footage–which prosecutors claimed they had never
seen. After watching it, they dropped all charges against Jeter.
The officers involved are now
facing various charges, including assault, misconduct and tampering with
evidence.
One of those officers, Orlando
Trinidad, gave an interview on Wednesday in which he claimed that his behavior
toward Jeter is explained by the fact that he didn’t know whether Jeter had a
gun. Trinidad was scared for his life, he said.
But Bloomfield Mayor Michael
Venezia was outraged, and said the police had clearly attempted a cover-up,
according to the New York Daily News.
Another disturbing detail–an
internal affairs investigation conducted by the Bloomfield police department
found no wrongdoing on the part of the officers.
In a statement, Jeter told
reporters that he would likely be in jail if the video footage was never
released.
“I’m sure that if this happened
to me, this could happen to a bunch of other people,” he said.