In yet another instance of existing while Black goes wrong, police tasered 14-year-old Avarius Thompson in his own backyard after he was mistaken for a suspect on the run,
Thompson, who is autistic, had gone to the grocery store to get snacks when he was assaulted by police. Per the incident report, “Dolton police were assisting police in the nearby village of Riverdale in the search for four Black males who had fled from a crashed, stolen vehicle – two of whom were allegedly carrying rifles and a handgun.”
The officers reportedly saw “two subjects — one of whom matched the description of a suspect sought in the incident – in a nearby backyard and pursued them.”
You can hear one of the officers saying, “Get your hands up. Hands up. Hands up,” via the body camera footage.
This was when the officer first tasered Thompson. “Get down. I got a Taser deployment,” the officer stated.
A few moments later, the officer tasered Thompson for the second time. “Stay down. Stay down. Don’t move. Don’t move,” the officer says. “You move, you’re going to get some more.” The situation becomes even more gut-wrenching because you can hear Thompson responding, saying “It’s not me!”
You can even hear Gwendolyn Toran, Thompson’s mother, saying “He’s autistic! You can’t arrest an autistic kid, man! Y’all tased him. Y’all did that,” during the disturbing video.
The body camera footage becomes even more condemning when a second officer is heard saying, “I don’t think that’s him, bro.”
The first officer’s response: “He took off running when I told him to stop!” And, the second officer responded, “This might not be him.”
Thompson was rushed to the hospital after the incident, and his parents revealed that their son “suffered a fractured hip, bruising and had taser marks on his body.”
“Everyone in the neighborhood loves him. His school loves him. He’s just a lovable kid. I just couldn’t believe that this could happen to my kid,” said Toran.
The attorney for the family, Calvin Townsend II, said “Far too often, we’re seeing this happen, not just in Illinois, but across the country…He’s a 14-year-old kid. Having officers run toward you with what we know are Tasers, but could be perceived as guns, is scary,” Townsend said. “And then, you add the autistic aspect. It’s very confusing.”
Sonia Pruitt, the founder of the Black Police Experience, a police reform advocacy group, and retired captain of the Montgomery County, Maryland Police Department, told ABC News, “what is concerning about this particular case [is] something else for me. [It] is that after the officers encountered young Mr. Thompson and he was tased in his own backyard, there was an officer who said, ‘I don’t think this is him.’”
“And so at what point did they not know that they were chasing the wrong person? We don’t see the body cam video from the rest of the incident from the beginning until when they encountered Mr. Thompson,” said Pruitt.
In a statement, the village of Dolton called the event “regrettable,” adding “that they are ‘committed to a thorough and transparent investigation with external reviews.”
“Mayor Tiffany A. Henyard demands that the police department adheres to the highest standards and has ordered a full review of the facts regarding this incident and has requested that the Village of Riverdale provide any documents [and/or] relevant information related to the matter to the Village of Dolton Police department,” reads the statement.
“Our dedication to serving and protecting our community remains unwavering, and we will take all necessary steps to prevent such incidents in the future,” the statement continued.
“Tasers, also known as conducted electrical or energy weapons, may be ranked below guns on the spectrum of police force, but using them has resulted in deaths,” PBS reports. Currently there are no state or federal agencies that track the number of injuries or deaths following a police officer’s use of a taser.
But, according to Fatal Encounters, a website that “attempts to track police-related deaths from the past two decades… There have been around 500 fatal taser encounters with police between 2010 and 2021 across the country.”