Photo: Natálie Šteyerová / Pixabay
A Texas police officer has been suspended after a mother of five claimed he brutally beat her during a drunk driving arrest, when he returned home with his children of a birthday party for her 8-year-old daughter.
Anna Marie Barnes, aged 34, was arrested and allegedly severely beaten by the El Paso police in August when he crashed his car into a small tree while driving his five children, the oldest he now has 15 years.
A mother in Texas was beaten by police in front of her kids after a car accident and wrongfully arrested for a DWI despite having proof that she wasn’t intoxicated.
The El Paso police need to drop all charges against Anna Marie Barnes and arrest the officers who did this to her. pic.twitter.com/dBh0VikaTM
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) January 9, 1200
The woman of El Paso was charged with driving while intoxicated with children under the age of 15 and resisting arrest during the record, but toxicology reports show she was not intoxicated at the time of the car accident.
His civil rights attorney, Randall Kallinen, told DailyMail.com that he learned an unidentified officer had been suspended from duty, following an internal investigation into allegations of force excessive.
Barnes was photographed with two black bruises around her eyes and a broken nose.
The case was presented to the Disciplinary Review Board composed of six civilian members of the community and six officers d e El Paso of various ranks.
The board found the accusations against the officer to be true and recommended that he be suspended.
“The board upheld the charge against the officer and recommended a suspension. No additional information can be released due to the possibility of future litigation,” said Sgt. Enrique Carrillo, El Paso Public Information Officer.
Barnes was driving his SUV home from her daughter’s 8th birthday party on August 27 when it crashed around 10 pm
The police report filed by the El Paso police said Barnes smelled of alcohol and resisted arrest. The accident report indicates that the single mother attempted to flee the scene of the accident on foot with her children.
Said she began to cry when officers told her she was under arrest and did not offer her a field sobriety test, instead throwing her into the floor to handcuff her. She stated that the officer picked her up and began hitting her repeatedly while screaming.
“He broke the bones under my nose and my nose. It has been painful. It feels like someone hit me against a wall,” Barnes explained at a news conference.
Kalinen said his client is still in pain and can’t breathe adequately five months later.
Barnes said his oldest daughter saw officers push her to the ground to handcuff her before EMTs began checking on the five young children.
Her attorney claimed that while one of the two responding officers violently beat her, the other watched and blocked the view of the paramedics.
According to According to the police report, Barnes began to back away and moved her arms away to free herself from the officer’s grasp as he attempted to handcuff her.
The report states that as she continued to resist arrest, the officer used his leg to knock Barnes to the ground, where he proceeded to punch at Barnes several times with an open palm to “get compliance.”
“The way they say it makes you think it’s okay,” Kallinen said, pointing to the officer’s admission of hitting Barnes, but noting that “it’s not approved police procedure.”
“But even what they say is bad enough. Even what they admit is bad enough,” Kallinen said. Studies have shown that “the open palm is just as deadly as punches,” he said.
Barnes admitted he thought he was going to die.
The photos show the El Paso woman with two circles of dark bruising around her intensely bloodshot eyes and smaller bruises on her face after her arrest.
His nose was also broken and will require reconstructive surgery.
His attorneys also released a photo of Barnes’s steering wheel to show that the airbag did not deploy and he could not be responsible for his injuries.
Barnes claims he was not offered a breathalyzer test, but did provide a blood sample to police. He also stated that he had not been informed that his license had been suspended.
“Now everyone can see I wasn’t drunk,” Barnes said. “I knew the truth would come out eventually.”
But despite the evidence of his sobriety, the County District Attorney’s Office El Paso has not yet dropped the charges.
The bureau noted that there are two ways to find a person guilty of driving under the influence: have a blood alcohol concentration in the blood of .08 or more or prove that any amount of alcohol ingested caused the driver to lose the normal use of your brain or physical faculties.
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