NEAR FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (WSVN) – A mother is accusing Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies of using excessive force with her son, but the department said recently-released body camera video will prove otherwise.
The incident was caught on video on the sidewalk along Northwest 13th Court near Fort Lauderdale, Thursday night.
Jenella Oliphant said her 27-year-old son, Emmitt Wright, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. At one point that day, she said he burned a nephew with a lighter.
“He was walking around, talking to himself, talking about killing people and stuff like that,” Oliphant said. “Everybody that passed by on the sidewalk, he was pointing a gun like he was going to shoot them with his finger. I figured if I called BSO, which I did in the past when he got like that, and they came out, and I had no problem.”
Oliphant said deputies used a Taser on Wright and broke his leg.
In a cellphone video, she could be heard telling the deputies their actions were caught on camera.
“It’s on film,” she said in the video. “I got all that on camera. You on film from hitting him with that stick.”
Video shot on a body camera showed Wright milling around, talking to deputies and holding his cellphone for nearly 15 minutes.
A deputy said in the video, “How you doing, my man. You good? What’s wrong? What’s bothering you today? I’m here to help you. I want to help you out.”
BSO said roughly a third of its deputies have been trained in crisis intervention — at least one deputy per shift.
BSO Maj. Steve Robson said, “The family members called us there. That’s not somebody that we can just let go and walk into the community and potentially harm somebody else. Somebody with an altered state of conscious, or going through a mental crisis, they might not recognize the consequences for what their actions would be for somebody who’s not going through a crisis like that, so it’s even more dangerous.”
Then, the body camera video shows Wright walking away and deputies taking him to the ground. Deputies said he would not put his hands behind his back, and the Taser did not work.
Deputies said they were then forced to use the baton.
“Come on, Emmitt. It’s OK. It’s over,” a deputy said in the body camera video.
Wright has since been taken into custody under Florida’s Baker Act and is in the hospital with a broken leg. He admitted he tried to get away from deputies but agrees with his mother that the force used was unnecessary.
“I wasn’t a threat to nobody,” Wright said over the phone. “I wasn’t a threat to myself. I wasn’t a threat to the police nor nobody in the neighborhood. To my knowledge, they didn’t have anything to do with the situation, so I basically told them, ‘Mind your business. This has nothing to do with y’all.'”
“While they were on him, one was kicking, one was punching him in the back and an officer picked up a stick off the ground and started beating him,” Oliphant said. “They need more training. Actually, the one who picked up that stick and beat him with it needs to be off the force. Period.”
On the bodycam footage a deputy could be heard saying, “You gotta better way to handle it you let me know.”
Oliphant said she will no longer use BSO because she feels rattled by the situation.
Because force was used, BSO said the incident is under routine review.
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