A George Floyd protester is suing the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) after allegedly being beaten in the chest by police officers and shot in the genitals with a rubber bullet.
Bradley Steyn, a South African and former spy for Nelson Mandela currently residing in Los Angeles, claimed that he suffered his injuries during a violent May 30 riot inspired by the George Floyd killing.
“Police just beating the hell out of them with police batons and it reminded me of apartheid in South Africa. And I just couldn’t stand by there idly anymore and watch any of this,” he remarked in an interview with Spectrum News 1. (RELATED: Police Arrest 2 St. Louis Women After Protesters Paint ‘Black Lives Matter’ On The Street.)
Steyn claims that he saw two police officers, “just really being violent with people.”
“One girl had fallen over, a black girl and this white guy was trying to help her up but the police just started climbing into them and beating the hell out of them,” he continued.
“I ran in there and tried to pick her up, tried to grab her,” he told the Daily Maverick in an exclusive interview. “I made physical contact with the police and a police officer hit me across the chest with a baton and I stumbled backwards. As I stumbled back a policeman about four metres away pointed his rifle at me and shot me with a rubber bullet twice, once on my thigh and one directly in the scrotum.”
Steyn told Spectrum News 1 that the experience “was incredibly painful. I had to go for emergency surgery on my testicles, because one of my testicles was ruptured.”
Steyn’s attorney Lisa Bloom decried the alleged assault on Steyn, stating that “police brutality is our national sin,” according to a press release.
In a press conference outside the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters this morning, Bloom added, “American police are out of control. At protests over police brutality, over and over again, they prove protestors’ point.”
The LAPD has declined to comment on the upcoming lawsuit.