Broward sheriff’s deputies pepper-sprayed, tackled and punched teens while responding to an after-school call near J.P. Taravella High School on Thursday afternoon, video shot by a student shows.
The footage shows at least two deputies take a boy down, bang his forehead into the pavement and repeatedly punch him in the head.
“BSO is aware of the video,” Veda Coleman-Wright, a spokeswoman for the agency said Thursday evening. “They’re investigating the incident to determine exactly what happened, how it started, how it escalated and they’re looking at the outcome of it.”
Since it surfaced, the video has been widely shared across social media platforms. On Friday morning, Broward County School Board member Rosalind Osgood tweeted her belief that the deputies seen on the video should face consequences. “This is unacceptable,” the tweet said. “The young man clearly had his hand by his side when he was attacked by these officers.”
The commotion erupted about 3 p.m. Thursday when deputies were called to a popular after-school hangout, a McDonald’s at 8375 N. Pine Island Road in Tamarac, about a half mile from the high school in Coral Springs.
The initial call to 911 came at 2:55 p.m. reporting that several students had gathered in the parking lot at the fast-food restaurant, Coleman-Wright said.
A follow-up call at 3:08 p.m. reported that kids were fighting, she said.
“Some students were detained and questioned,” Coleman-Wright said after 6:30 p.m. “At this point, we haven’t confirmed if any arrests have been made.”
The 10th-grader who recorded the video with his cellphone said the boy who was tackled face-down on the pavement was in handcuffs and “bleeding a lot” when he was taken away in an ambulance.
“It was just crazy,” the boy who shot the video, and whose mother did not want his name to be published, said. “It was very overboard. Punching him and slamming his head on the ground wasn’t necessary.”
Thursday was the last day of the school week before the Good Friday holiday, Coleman-Wright said
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