It was 8:45 p.m. on a Saturday night when San Jose police knocked on the hotel door of a young couple inside a Holiday Inn to tell them to turn down their music because somebody had complained.
The couple had already turned the music down thirty minutes earlier after a hotel employee knocked on the door and the cops even acknowledged it was at a respectable level.
However, the cops were in full predator mode that night and were not about to just leave it at that.
Instead, they ordered the man, Paea Tukuafu, out of the room and demanded to see his identification even though they had no legal basis to do so.
Tukuafu questioned their need to see his ID but eventually relented at the urging of his fiancee, Marissa Santa Cruz, who was trying to de-escalate the conversation.
But as usual, the cops ended up escalating the incident, refusing to return their identifications before beating, tasering and shooting them a rubber bullet known as a “sponge grenade.”
Body cam footage obtained by ABC News shows a group of cops empowered by their tactical gloves and their license to kill, looking for any excuse to use their weapons even if it’s to enforce something as petty as playing the music too loud before 9 p.m. It is nothing but state-sanctioned thuggery.
No wonder San Jose police tried so desperately to keep the video from being released in the name of “officer safety.”
Essentially, the cops became upset after the couple went inside the room to retrieve their identifications and Santa Cruz closed the door behind them.
”You slammed the door in our face,” one of the cops said which is the excuse they used to evict them from the room.
And when they did not leave fast enough, they ended up getting beaten, abused and tortured where they had to be transported to the hospital before being taken to jail.
The incident took place on May 18, 2019 and no charges were filed against the couple until four months later when they filed a notice of claim in August, which is the first step in filing a lawsuit.
That was when they were charged with several felonies, including trying to take the cop’s gun and battery on an officer, charges that appear to still be pending.
San Jose police responded to the lawsuit by filing a motion to keep the body camera from going public, claiming the videos show the face of a cop named Michael Pina whom they say has been the victim of death threats from the friends and family members of a man he killed in 2017 named Jacob Dominquez in which he was cleared of any wrongdoing.
But the judge apparently approved the release of some of the video, specifically the one from Pina’s body camera so we do not get to see his face but we can see he is on a power trip.
Be sure to watch the ABC News segment in the video below or click here if it does not come up because the reporter documents step-by-step how police escalated the incident. The video above is just a short segment of what took place that night.
