A man who was found drunk and sleeping outside a Louisiana State University parking lot was successfully booked into a local jail after hurling racial slurs at and attacking a police officer.
An officer with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office approached Jonas Reese Crystal, a 25-year-old white man from Prairieville, Louisiana, early Sunday morning, according to a police report obtained by The Advocate.
The officer woke up Crystal and asked if he needed someone to take him home. But rather than accept the help, Crystal offered up several phony names for the officer and was “very resistive.” That led the responding officer to detain him and put him in the back of the squad car, the police report stated.
As the officer spoke to Crystal’s father on the phone, the young man became more agitated, kicking the inside of the squad car as well as kicking the officer in the torso and arm while he attempted to handcuff Crystal and shut the squad car door.
“He heard what had happened and apologized repeatedly for Crystal’s actions,” the report said of how Crystal’s father responded while speaking to the officer.
That wasn’t the end of Crystal’s behavior, however. While the officer completed the paperwork, the report alleges he told the officer he wanted him dead and made several racist and homophobic comments toward him.
Crystal was booked into the EBRSO Sunday morning. Among the charges outlined in documents on the agency’s website are disturbing the peace, intoxication, resisting an officer and battery of an officer. Bond has not yet been set in Crystal’s arrest, and he was released from custody on Monday evening.
The fact that Crystal allegedly was able to behave in a violent matter with no use of police force early Sunday stands in juxtaposition to what happened a day earlier when police opened fire on a 28-year-old Black woman who was in a home with her 8-year-old nephew in Fort Worth, Texas.
An officer with the Fort Worth Police Department fatally shot Atatiana Jefferson at around 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning after responding to a call for a welfare check. The officer had fired the shot through a bedroom window of the home.
Bodycam footage showed the officer had been searching the perimeter of the house when he shined a light through a window and shouted, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” Nearly simultaneously, a shot is fired and the video cuts to black. Despite officers providing medical care, Jefferson was pronounced dead at the scene.
