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- The mother of the teenage girl who was slammed to the ground by a school resource officer said her daughter suffers from memory loss, WESH 2 reported.
- The incident, captured in a viral video, occurred at a Florida high school when an officer threw 16-year-old Taylor Bracey on the ground before cuffing her.
- Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is calling for the officer to be fired and charged for the incident.
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The mother of a Black teenage girl who thrown onto concrete and handcuffed by a school resource officer said her daughter has suffered from memory loss.
“She’s having problems sleeping, and she’s having a problem remembering,” Jamesha Bracey, mother of 16-year-old Taylor Bracey, told Florida’s WESH 2.
Her daughter, a student at Liberty High School in Kissimmee, Florida, is seen in a graphic video that went viral on social media last week. The video appears to show the teen’s head and body hit the ground before she was cuffed by the officer. In the footage, Bracey appears to lay on the concrete unconscious as a second officer stood by.
—Ben Crump (@AttorneyCrump) January 27, 2021
The resource officer has been identified as Deputy Ethan Fournier of the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office, according to WESH 2. The sheriff’s office said in a news release that Fournier was trying to stop a fight between Bracey and another student.
However, civil rights attorney Ben Crump told NBC News, "There was never a fight."
"There was a verbal altercation. Taylor never touched anybody, and then this police officer does what we see on that video," Crump who represents the Bracey family added, according to NBC News.
Sheriff Marcos Lopez of the Osceola County Sheriff's Office said in the press conference on Wednesday that Fournier "does not have a history of misconduct" and was placed on paid administrative leave.
"We are right now have made the decision to turn this investigation over as criminal to the Department of Flordia Law Enforcement," Sheriff Lopez said. "We're going to allow them to take over this investigation and work with our state attorney's office to make sure this is completely independent of our agency...complete transparency."
Bracey told WFTV that her daughter is suffering from headaches and blurry vision in addition to memory loss. She added that the teen is "just traumatized by the ordeal," the news station reported. According to the outlet Bracey also stated that following being slammed to the ground, all her daughter remembers "was waking up in the principal's office."
Crump is calling for the officer to be fired and charged for the incident.
"We demand that this officer be terminated because this is unacceptable that you can do this to our children and not be held accountable, Crump told CBS News. "And we also want him to be charged with aggravated assault and battery on a child because Taylor was a child, he was a grown man."
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