A Washington police officer who is responsible for training other officers was caught on video physically abusing a 15-year-old girl, then claiming she had attacked him.
The charges never stuck and now Tacoma police officer Jared Williams is being sued.
Williams was in full uniform and working an off-duty security job at Tacoma Mall when he spotted two teenagers riding their bicycles through the parking lot on May 24, 2015.
Doing his duty to keep the mall safe, he chased the two teens in his patrol car, ordering them to stop. He was joined by a mall security guard who was in another car.
Monique Charlene Tillman, who was 15 years old, asked why she and her brother had been stopped.
Williams said they had been causing a disturbance and were being trespassed from the mall, according to a press release from the Tamaki Law Firm, which is representing Tillman.
Tillman insisted they had done nothing wrong, saying they frequently rode their bikes through the mall on their way home.
She then tried to leave, which angered Williams, according to the lawsuit, which you can read here.
The video shows the cop grabbing her by arm and swinging her off her bicycle, then pressing his hands against her neck as he shoved her against a parked car.
He then swings her around a few more times, then grabs her by her hair and pulls her down on the ground.
And he then pulls out his taser and stuns her for good measure.
“It felt like electricity running through my veins,” she told KOMO News in an article last year.
He then handcuffs her and takes her to jail, charging her with assault on a police officer and resisting arrest, which were both dropped during a trial.
In his report, he claimed Tillman and her brother were cutting off cars with their bicycles and yelling and swearing at drivers.
But unlike Tillman’s attorneys, they were unable to produce video to back up those claims.
Williams graduated from the University of Puget Sound, a music school in Tacoma, which stated the following about him on a webpage about alumni.
