"I Was Just Laying on the Ground Screaming": Protestors Recount Alleged Abuse While In Custody

by Carolyn Bick

Face-down in the gravel, hands cuffed behind her back, Ash could hear herself screaming. She had just been arrested by a group of Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers, who had come speeding across the grass towards a group of protestors at Cal Anderson Park during a Black Lives Matter protest on July 25.

"I was dragged across the gravel on my face. I began to have a panic attack, and I was just laying on the ground screaming. I was picked up and hit with a baton. I was forcefully shoved backwards, so my legs hit this ledge behind me, forcing me into a seated position," Ash says in a video she later recorded about the incident, so she wouldn't have to relive the trauma she experienced over and over again recounting the story for different journalists and lawyers who have approached her. Several times throughout the video, Ash has to pause and collect herself.

"I told them I was having a panic attack, that I couldn't get up, that I was injured," says Ash, who has declined to give her last name to protect her privacy. "And then I was thrown onto the ground again, and four officers in riot gear tackled me, put a knee on my back and arrested me face-down. They also left me face-down for several minutes, until I sat myself up."

The officers who arrested Ash and other protesters around 7:30 or 8 p.m. that night also allegedly did not tell Ash what she was being arrested for, other than "sarcastically" telling her that she "shouldn't have been there." The officers also allegedly ripped off the protesters' masks, and were not wearing any themselves, despite the current pandemic and the statewide mandatory masking order.

What Ash says happened to her during her arrest and during her detention over the next 15 hours is not unique. According to Ash and her lawyer, Sad Smith, several other protesters who were scooped up by SPD officers that night suffered similar abuse.

One protester named Samantha Six was allegedly denied her seizure medication. Six texted Smith details about the experience of her arrest and detention, which Smith shared to Twitter with Six's consent via direct screenshots of their conversation. A video taken immediately prior to Six's arrest can be found here.

In the screenshots shared to Twitter, Six said that she was put in a psychiatric ward cell, because she continued to scream that she needed her medication. When she tried to give her neurologist's name to the nurse, Six said that "the nurse walked away from me, telling me I needed to change my attitude before she would listen and she didn't ask me for my specialist, she asked for my pharmacy so that's just how its [sic] going to be."

It is unclear from the screenshots if this took place in the West Precinct or at the King County Jail, though Smith said she believes it was at the jail. Six was not immediately available for comment.

In her video, Ash backs up Six's recollection of screaming for her medication, saying that Six's screaming was the first thing she heard upon entering the West Precinct, where she, Six, and several other protestors were first held. Ash says in the video that Six, who was in a different holding cell, was "distraught, desperate, screaming," but that officers were "laughing at her, calling her crazy."

"Even after she left, and she's saying, 'Where's my meds? I need my meds' — she was transported [to the King County Jail] before I was — even after she left, one officer was obsessively talking about 'the blonde gal,' meaning Samantha, and she was crazy, and how mean she was to them — meaning that she was screaming for her medicine," Ash says. "How glad they were she was gone — they were just consistently making fun of her condition."

After reading the original version of this article, Jake Koenigsberg, another protester who was arrested and detained separately from Ash and Six, reached out to the Emerald on Friday morning to say that he also heard Six screaming for her medicine in the holding cell at the West Precinct. He also said that the officers mocked and ignored Six's pleas.

Ash says that officers also mocked the remaining protesters, telling her, "how do I like being lumped in with all the protesters, just like they are being lumped in with all the bad cops, as they abused me."

"It was very clear that they were enjoying our detainment and our abuse," Ash says.

In her text messages to Smith, Six said she was offered a used face mask that she refused, saying that she wanted a blue medical face mask like she saw law enforcement officers wearing, because she knew that would be clean. After that, she said, law enforcement officers "[threw] a net over my face and [slammed] me into a chair to cuff me," because she refused the used face mask. Before that, she said, she was forced to strip in front of a male officer, who allegedly said, "'I appreciate your mediocre participation' before smirking and slamming the door."

She also said that this male officer "was informed I'm a rape survivor before making that comment and smirk[.]"

When a woman took her fingerprints that night, Six said she asked the woman if she could feel and see Six's hands shaking from the seizures she had been having. Six said the woman said yes, but that "reporting it to anyone beyond finger printing [sic] wasn't her job."

Again, it is unclear from these text messages where the fingerprinting or the alleged mask incident described above took place — at the West Precinct or at the King County Jail — and Smith said in a later text message to the Emerald that she was unsure about the location. Six was not immediately available for comment.

When Ash was moved to and fingerprinted at the King County Jail, Ash says in the video that she could again hear Six screaming, except when Six was quiet and lying on the floor.

"And that's when we were most worried about her," Ash said in a follow-up text message to the Emerald.

Leading up to her transport to King County Jail, Ash says she and others were forced to sit on the ground of their concrete cell, their hands cuffed behind their backs for hours. A fellow protester, David Stanton, who was arrested around the same time as Ash, said in a written statement emailed to the Emerald that the group was there until well past midnight, just sitting on the hard floor, cuffs digging into their skin.

"While in SPD custody an officer tightened another detainee's and my cuffs so tight after we used the toilet that the cuffs broke through our skin, and when asked to loosen them she refused. Only after well over an hour did another officer agree to loosen the cuffs but scolded us for moving too much," Stanton's statement reads.

Most of the other protesters were also covered in pepper spray, and Ash says none of them were allowed to wash up. Everyone was denied medical treatment and many were denied their medications, Ash said in a later phone interview with the Emerald. One young woman, Ash said, had so much pepper spray on her face that she could barely open her eyes. Another young woman with a spinal injury allegedly suffered during her arrest was never taken to the hospital and never received medical care, instead forced to sit against a hard stone wall. Even after Ash got home, her wounds were still filled with gravel from being dragged across the ground.

After Stanton and four or five others were transported to the jail sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., Stanton said he was booked and allowed to make a phone call around 2 a.m. However, this was not the case for all the protesters: Six said she pleaded and "pounded on the door for hours demanding my attorney and phone call and never got it and was left in solitary to have seizures in front of officers and medical staff. [King County Jail guards] even mocked them [my seizures]."

Smith said in an interview with the Emerald that when she went to visit Six and three other protestors the morning of July 26, she was denied access to Six. The guard told Smith that Six had said she didn't want a lawyer, and allegedly wanted a phone call, first, before she spoke with a lawyer. Six also told Smith that "I NEVER told officers I didn't want to see my legal [representation]."

"They wouldn't say why they wouldn't give her a phone call. They just didn't," Smith said.