There are times when I find myself absolutely disgusted with the capacity humans contain for inflicting pain and death upon their fellow homo sapiens. It seems people with incredibly high capacities for such behavior often find themselves in places of power tying others down and pepper spraying them to death:
No doubt you’ve heard the adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture of 62-year-old Nick Christie could be worth thousands of dollars when a jury sees it.
The photo shows the Ohio man restrained inside the Lee County Jail with his body covered in pepper spray.
“This photo is a picture of a man who is strapped to a chair naked inside a jail for hours with a hood over his face. That evokes thoughts of being tortured,” says Cleveland-based lawyer Nick DiCello who represents the Christie family.
So who is the man pictured in this photograph? A poor son of a bitch whose wife called the police in order to take her depressed husband to the hospital and ensure he received his medication:
“I was shocked. This was something out of a horror movie,” says Joyce Christie. She said her husband was depressed and was showing signs of erratic behavior a few days before leaving for Florida.
She called authorities and pleaded with them to take her husband to a hospital and be given his medications. Instead, he was taken to jail for disorderly intoxication.
Instead he was taken, strapped to a chair, and pepper sprayed until he died. Obviously the officers who committed this heinous act are now in prison for murder… never mind that only happens to mere serfs like you and me:
The District 21 Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide because he had been restrained and sprayed with pepper sprayed by law enforcement officers. But to this day, nobody has ever been charged with a crime, and the Lee County State Attorney cleared the sheriff’s office of any wrong doing.
It’s been more than two and a half years and his wife still can’t accept what happened.
The motto found on my police cars throughout the country is, “To serve and protect.” This motto implies the police are supposed to serve and protect us but it seems from historical examples such as this one that they really exist to serve and protect each other. I’m curious if police brutality has been on the rise or has always been this prevalent that has only been brought to light with the invention of the information superhighway we known as the Internet.