A grandfather was driven face-first into the floor by a police officer inside an Arizona department store on Thanksgiving night, according to video footage and witness accounts.
Jerald Newman, 54, is a custom furniture maker who preaches through the California prison system, his daughter said.
On November 24, 2011, a Walmart in Buckeye opened its doors late on Thanksgiving night to begin a Black Friday sale.
A crowd of shoppers was already shoving for position over discounted video games, witnesses said.
Newman had entered the store alongside his young grandson, whom he had raised since birth. But the boy fell to the floor in the chaos and cut his lip, according to family accounts.
Newman’s daughter, Berneta Sanchez, was also present inside the store that night.
Sanchez later described seeing grown adults tearing video games directly out of children’s hands that evening.
Adults and teenagers were fighting each other for copies on the same shelf, according to the family.
Newman bent down to check on his hurt grandson amid the crowd. But to prevent the video game from being snatched away by other shoppers, he tucked it into his waistband, his daughter said.
Someone in the crowd flagged down a Buckeye police officer and pointed toward Newman, witnesses said.
The encounter that followed was captured on video by bystander David Chadd, a CNN iReporter who stood close enough to view the entire scene.
Newman “was not resisting” as the officer began leading him away from the crowd, Chadd said. Then, without warning, the officer hooked his leg around Newman’s and drove him face-first into the floor.
“It was like a bowling ball hitting the ground, that’s how bad it was,” Chadd said afterward.
Video footage recorded at the scene shows Newman lying motionless and head-down in a spreading pool of blood, apparently unconscious.
Officers then turned Newman over onto his back to check on him, the video shows.
His face, covered almost entirely in blood, came into view for the crowd still gathered around him, according to the recording.
The reaction from surrounding shoppers was immediate and audible on the video recording.
“Why would you throw him down so hard? All he did was shoplifting and you threw him down like that?” one voice can be heard asking on the tape.
“They threw him down,” another voice added on the recording. “He wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
The grandfather lay handcuffed on the floor in the pool of blood. But two bystanders stepped in on their own to press paper towels against his face to slow the bleeding, witnesses said.
Newman remained unconscious on the floor for roughly ten minutes before he came to, Chadd estimated.
Newman was taken to a hospital bed following the takedown. Yet even from the hospital bed, his only concern was for the boy, Sanchez said.
Police took Newman into custody and booked him into a Maricopa County jail on charges of resisting arrest and shoplifting, records show.
He remained locked inside the county facility until his release the following Saturday, according to jail records.
His wife, Pamela Newman, spoke to reporters following his release from custody. But she told reporters her husband was “as good as expected… but emotionally and mentally a wreck.”
Buckeye Assistant Police Chief Larry Hall confirmed the department would investigate whether the officer’s use of force fell “within reason” based on policy and law.
The department launched an internal review into the officer’s actions. But an independent agency might also be brought in “just to show transparency,” Hall said.
Newman’s defense attorney, Todd Nolan, stated that his office would begin gathering evidence to prove his client’s innocence within days of the arrest.
Prosecutors moved the criminal case forward against the grandfather on the resisting-arrest and shoplifting charges. But Newman subsequently filed a civil lawsuit against the city over the injuries he sustained.
Buckeye ultimately paid Newman a $30,000 out-of-court settlement rather than let the case go to trial, records show.
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