A video clip has surfaced showing a police officer at Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, Texas vehemently body-slamming a 12-year-old girl to the ground.
Like similar videos before it, the video has quickly gone viral, reports local NBC affiliate WOAI-TV.
The very raw March 29 footage shows the inexperienced school cop, Joshua Kehm, picking up the sixth-grade girl, Janissa Valdez, and tossing her hard forcefully.
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“You could just hear where she hits the ground,” the sixth grader’s mother, Gloria Valdez, told WOIA. “And it’s nothing but concrete, cement.”
“She was just knocked out,” the mad mother continued. “I wanted answers and nobody could give me answers. I contacted the vice principal. I talked to the officer. He did what he had to do at the moment. Those were his words.”
The backstory, according to Janissa Valdez, is that she was approaching an unidentified female student when she was waylaid and body-slammed by Kehm, the cop. Many people in the crowded hallway — including Kehm, apparently — believed the two students were about to have a sixth-grade girl fight.
Janissa Valdez disputes the allegation that she intended to be involved in a fight.
Her memory of the body-slamming part of the incident is hazy. Janissa Valdez says she lost consciousness when Kehm bashed her head on the unforgiving floor and then placed handcuffs on her.
The sixth grader now has a notably bruised face and a big bump on her head.
Both the San Antonio Independent School District and San Antonio police have initiated investigations into Kehm’s actions.
“That video is alarming,” school district spokeswoman Leslie Price told San Antonio CBS affiliate KENS-TV. “We are gathering all the info we can to see what led up to it.”
“We need to find out the details as to what occurred, but I can say that we will not tolerate excessive force in this district,” Price also said, according to Fox News.
Kehm, who has been a school police officer for just over a year, has declined to speak to the press.
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