*The Virginia police officer accused of pepper-spraying a Black and Latino military officer and holding him at gunpoint during a traffic stop in December has been fired.
We previously reported, Army Lt. Caron Nazario has filed suit against police officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker for violating his civil rights during an encounter that was captured on the officers’ body cameras, and the footage recently went viral.
Nazario was repeatedly pepper-sprayed and physically attacked by a cop … all over the fact he didn’t have a rear license plate.
Lt. Nazario was driving his Chevy Tahoe in Windsor, Virginia when cops noticed he didn’t have plates. You can see from the bodycam, the Chevy appears to be new and there’s a registration attached to the window. Once cops lit him up, he drove a little under a mile before pulling into a well-lit gas station, and from there, things went left.
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Per TMZ, “Nazario has his hands up in the air the whole time, but the cop is increasingly frustrated and then amps things up, pepper-spraying Nazario 4 times. His dog was in the back choking from the pepper spray,” the outlet writes, adding “Nazario is pulled out of the SUV and is sobbing as he’s ordered to the ground and cuffed.”
The lawsuit alleges that Gutierrez and Crocker didn’t have probable cause to charge Nazario with any crimes, the stop was illegal, and that the police officers threatened to ruin the Army officer’s military career should he file charges against them. Nazario has sued Gutierrez and Crocker of violating his constitutional rights under the Fourth and First Amendments.
“Incidents like this are unacceptable,” Attorney General Mark Herring said in a statement. “As our office continues to monitor the situation, the Windsor Police Department needs to be fully transparent about what happened during the stop and what was done in response to it.”
The regional NAACP said the video clip is proof “of what the NAACP has actually been claiming the whole time,” the Island of Wight branch said in a statement. “It shows up from the video clip that our justice is still being abused by policeman as well as we are really worried.”
“Please understand this will certainly not go unaddressed,” the team claimed. “We are done passing away. We will certainly not stand calmly while an additional African American’s civil liberties are breached.”
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