Activist Shaun King accused a Texas state trooper of assaulting a woman and threatening to shoot her black fiancé before a body camera video released Wednesday contradicted those claims.
Lawyer S. Lee Merritt found evidence showing a police officer assaulting Sherita Dixon-Cole during a May 20 traffic stop, King told his Twitter followers in a May 20 tweet. King then claimed Officer Daniel Hubbard threatened to shoot the woman’s fiancé.
However, the video found no evidence to support the allegations, Texas’ Department of Public Safety (DPS) said and provided the video to the Ellis County District Attorney’s Office. Merritt, the attorney for Dixon-Cole, accepted the findings and said Hubbard “should be cleared of any wrongdoing.” (RELATED: Shaun King: I Won’t Speak Up About Chicago Assault Because Black People Are Always Punished)
Dixon-Cole, a Texas resident, was pulled over Sunday for a traffic violation in Ellis County then arrested for driving while intoxicated. She was taken to jail shortly thereafter. Hubbard arrested her because he “didn’t like her attitude,” King claimed in his tweet.
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“The department is appalled that anyone would make such a despicable, slanderous and false accusation against a peace officer who willingly risks his life every day to protect and serve the public,” DPS said in a statement shortly after the video was released to the public.
Lawyer Vance Dunnam Jr., who represents another police officer with the same last name as Daniel Hubbard, wrote a letter Monday to Merritt and King claiming they identified his client, Jarrod Kyle Hubbard, as the officer involved the incident. (RELATED: Shaun King: ‘Ungrateful Is The New’ N-Word)
Jarrod Kyle Hubbard has “been erroneously identified through the internet and other means (including without limitation, by photograph, Facebook account and contact information) as the officer involved in the event,” Dunnam Jr. wrote in the letter.
King, a Black Lives Matter activist and former writer with the New York Daily News, addressed Dixon-Cole’s false accusation in a Medium article Wednesday.
“I can’t even begin to make sense of why someone would concoct such an awful story — particularly in light of the reality that both police brutality and sexual assaults are a very real crisis in this nation,” he wrote. “It does a tremendous disservice to actual victims when something horrible like this is fabricated. It provides an unfair spotlight to a good cop and undeserved cover for the bad ones who will try to use an incident like this as false proof of their innocence.”
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