St. Floriss Prosecutor Attorney Tim Lohmar said on Wednesday that Joshua Smith, who works at the Florissant Police Department in Missouri, is facing first and fourth-degree assault charges and armed crimes.
According to prosecutors, the accusations were made after reviewing images recorded on 2 June from a residence’s surveillance camera. Smith was fired on June 10.
“The moment the vehicle turned its headlights into a victim, it became 4000 pounds of missiles,” Lohmar told reporters.
Smith’s lawyer Scott Rosenblum told CNN that the video was a small part of the match and failed to tell the entire story of the incident, which he called “accident under extraordinary conditions”.
The officer was looking for a vehicle.
“We have a situation where the driver jumps from a moving vehicle after take-off and allows the vehicle to remain idle,” Rosenblum said in an e-mail. “Unexpectedly, the injured person jumped out of the car. Mr. Smith never intended to hit him. Nor did I expect him to jump out of a car moving in front of another passenger.”
The video from the stage shows the man shot while running down a car while slowly descending down a street.
The fourth-degree attack said he was already suffering from a broken ankle when an old officer was kicking the victim on the ground.
A possible reason statement says that Smith hit the man before he was handcuffed.
“At least it was shocking to say,” Lohmar said from the video.
Jerryl Christmas, the lawyer of the unidentified wounded man, told CNN member KMOV that his client was “traumatized by serious injury requiring surgery and was traumatized by this shocking incident”.
Smith, who has been with Florissant police for nine years before being fired last week after the release of the previous video, said Lohmar said it was security-related because of “tips for looting and vandalism” after anti-racist protests in the region. .
Smith, 31, and two other police officers in the SUV, said he was following a car that matches the description of a car involved in an “fired” event days ago.
When the authorities turned on the siren and lights of Ford Explorer, the car did not pull off immediately. Finally, as residents got out and fled, he stopped in a residential area, Lohmar said. According to Lohmar, the victim was one of these three people.
Florissant is located in the north of St. Louis and close to Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed in 2014, facing the police who accelerated the Black Lives Matter movement.
CNN’s Gregory Lemos contributed to this report.
