Video footage surfaced earlier this month of a 15-year-old Detroit high school student being manhandled and pepper sprayed by a resource officer late last year.
On Dec. 9, Destiny Heard reportedly arrived late to school and decided to use the elevator to get to class.
A teacher on the elevator asked to see her elevator pass. Destiny complied, producing an expired slip.
She was immediately told to get out of the elevator.
The young girl got off and lingered by the elevator. This prompted the teacher to call a school resource officer because the teacher assumed Destiny was trying to get back in.
The officer reportedly yelled at her and threatened to take Destiny’s phone. According to the girl’s interview with Vice on May 20, she put on her headphones to block out the officer’s yelling.
Destiny told Vice:
“I truly did not expect anything like this to happen when I went to school. I’ve read about police brutality and read about it happening at other schools, but you don’t think, ‘Oh I am going to school, and this is what’s going to happen to me.’ I was absolutely hysterical and surprised. I didn’t understand what I did.”
The footage shows three officials standing around her as she sits on the floor. Destiny said she was asking for medical attention because she was pepper sprayed for not handing over her phone.
Detroit’s ABC 7 spoke to her mother, Venus Heard, the same week the footage appeared online:
“She told me he said, ‘I am going to take that phone from you.’ She said, ‘Why? I haven’t done anything.’ He reached for her phone and she pulled her phone away and he couldn’t get it,” she told reporters. “At what point was someone going to act like an adult? Nobody acted or behaved as an adult should have acted. Is this how you treat your children at home? Would you pepper spray your child? Would you slam them into the wall?”
The girl was suspended for a month after the incident. Now, her mother has demanded the firing of the officers involved.
