Aliyya Swaby Photo
Agnew Jr. tells his story to crowd outside 1 Union Ave.
A crowd picketed outside the police station Sunday the morning after cops pepper-sprayed a man outside a liquor store — and arrested and allegedly confiscated a phone from a friend who was video-recording the action.
The demonstration supported Jeffrey Agnew Jr. and Tyeisha Hellamns, whom police arrested after a confrontation outside Beverage Boss at 226 Whalley Ave. around 9:30 p.m. Saturday.
The arrestees tell a different story from the one given by cops and the store’s owner.
ID Request
Beverage Boss, across from the Whalley jail.
Agnew, who is 28 and lives in New Haven, had entered the store with Hellamns and Hellamns’ cousin.
One of the women tried to buy alcohol with a credit card but didn’t have ID. The clerk insisted on ID. Agnew offered up his ID. The clerk said his ID couldn’t be used with her credit card. A security guard intervened, saying the clerk couldn’t sell him alcohol.
According to police spokesman Officer David Hartman, Agnew responded, “Who the fuck are you talking to me? You’re nobody.” Hartman said Agnew started screaming and threatening people.
Beverage Boss owner Hasu Patel, who said he witnessed the encounter, offered a similar version in an interview with the Independent. He quoted Agnew as saying, “Whether you sell to me or don’t sell to me, I’m going out with a Hennsessy.” And: “Goddamned Indians. You come in here to this country and own the gas stations and the liquor stores.” Patel is Indian-American, Agnew, African-American.
Agnew told the Independent Sunday that he argued with the person behind the counter “about being able to purchase the liquor.” He said he realized the person seemed immediately ready to call the cops and after a verbal altercation, did make the call. At that point Agnew and Hellamns left the store to return to their car, he said.
Patel said store security escorted Agnew outside, and Agnew kept returning and screaming at people. The store called cops, who showed up — first a couple of officers, then, when a fight broke out right outside on the sidewalk, many more.
Who Struck First?
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Agnew Jr. inside the police station after being processed and released.
Beverage Boss employees and the store’s security officers were “after us,” Agnew said. “I was trying to leave, because obviously what we were trying to do wasn’t going to happen.”
Three officers arrived at the scene at first, Agnew said. One, a light-skinned black man, pulled him to the side and began to talk to him about what had happened in the liquor store.
Two other officers, one Asian man and a white woman, walked up to him. The female officer started talking to him as well, which he said was “fine.”
As the Asian-American officer approached him, Agnew said he “stepped toward him” to begin talking to him, an instinctual move. All of a sudden, Agnew said, he was being arrested. The officer “started wrestling me to the ground” and handcuffed him. He felt a hand “hitting me in the head” over and over. He said he was hit on the top left side of his head with a billy club. Then he felt “liquid all over my head” and realized he was being pepper sprayed.
“I kept saying, ‘Why? Why? Why am I being pepper sprayed for just raising my voice?’ My mind is blown,” he said, trembling as he told the story. “I regained my sight about 1.5 hours ago.” He denied that he ever resisted arrest.
Patel said he saw Agnew lunge first at the cops. According to a release issued Sunday by Officer Hartman: “Agnew refused to provide officers with his ID. Now outside, he continued screaming at the store employees. The officers told him he was under arrest and asked him to place his hands behind his back. He refused all such orders. Agnew lunged at an officer. He fought with them and violently resisted arrest. He placed his hands beneath his stomach on the ground to prevent officers from handcuffing him. Agnew was warned he’d be pepper-sprayed if he didn’t comply. He didn’t and was pepper-sprayed. The pepper-spray wasn’t effective. The officer struck Agnew on his bicep with his baton.
“Agnew complied only after the mention of a Taser. A Taser wasn’t used. Agnew was medically evaluated, released from the hospital and transported to the detention facility at police headquarters where he was booked.”
Police arrested Agnew on a disorderly conduct and interfering charges.
First they took him to the hospital.
“Once I got there, I was just blind. I couldn’t see nothing,” Agnew said. “My face is still kind of on the spicy side,” he said with a laugh. His left arm is swollen and bruised, he said.
Police released him on bond at noon Sunday. Hartman stated in his release that Agnew “has been arrested eight times since 2009.” The state judicial database shows that Agnew is currently out on $10,000 bond on a sexual assault charge, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Camera Taken?
Tyesha Hellamns had her cellphone video-camera as the fight unfolded.
A cop approached her.
“Get the fuck out or you get locked up too!” he told her as she recorded the scene.
Then he arrested her.
She said the cop took her phone. She said that she got it back later, after being arrested on a disorderly conduct charge. The footage was not erased: The video appears at the top of this story. It begins with her shooting the footage; then the camera angle shifts and the screen goes blank after she is arrested.
“What did I do? What did I do?” Hellamns can be heard screaming in the video. “I’m straight. I didn’t do nothing to nobody.”
“She was arrested for disorderly conduct when she grabbed an officer,” Hartman said when asked on Sunday. (Her arrest did not appear in the press release.) He denied that an officer took the woman’s camera.
If an officer did take the camera, he may have violated a department rule, and the law.
The New Haven police have been plagued in recent years by incidents in which cops illegally seized the cameras of citizens recording their actions in public. The department issued a general order against doing that, making clear that the act of recording an officer’s actions cannot constitute interference. After the city settled two lawsuits on the matter for a combined total of $31,500, and two high-ranking cops left the department after being found to have acted improperly. The department agreed in a consent decree to update the policy because the chief found it had been written too vaguely. The department also promised to train its cops not to seize people’s cameras. A civil-rights attorney who represented two citizens who had phones seized has since blasted the department for “foot-dragging” on complying with the consent decree.
A new state law — pushed by New Haven legislators in response to those past incidents — allows citizens to sue cops personally for arresting or seizing the cameras of citizens who photograph and video-record officers in public.
Crowd Keeps Vigil, Grows
Agnew Sr.
When Agnew and Hellamns were released from police custody Sunday morning, about 20 demonstrators were on the station’s steps ready to hear their story and rally against injustice in the department.
The size of the crowd slowly grew between 8 a.m. and noon, as Agnew and Hellamns told their story, claiming that police attacked them without cause and prevented them from their right to record police activity during an arrest.
The rally Sunday morning drew people from different anti-police brutality organizations around the city, as well as friends and family members of Agnew and Hellamns. Lia Miller-Granger, the head of Black Lives Matter New Haven, arrived with a group of five or six other activists at around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, soon after they found out Agnew and Hellamns had been arrested.
Agnew’s father, Jeffrey Agnew Sr., woke up Sunday morning to eight voicemails and numerous missed calls saying his “son got beat up by the cops.” He headed to the police station immediately. His son had already been released once he arrived. “I wanted to make sure he was all right.”
Agnew Sr. said he plans to see a lawyer Monday to consider pressing a complaint against the police.
Alder Brackeen vouched for Agnew.
Upper Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen, Jr. went to Hillhouse High School with Agnew Jr. “I know Jeff. Everyone out here who knows Jeff will tell yo. … He’s a great guy. He sticks to whatever he believes in and he definitely knows his rights,” Brackeen said. “It’s clear the situation escalated.”
Though he had not yet seen the video at the time of the rally, he said based on the stories Agnew and Hellamns told, it’s a “problem” that Agnew was allegedly beaten after he was handcuffed. “The worst thing Jeff would do is talk,” Brackeen said. “He’s opinionated. There’s no reason for it. That’s an escalation clearly.”
He said later that he was not aware of Agnew’s past arrest record and understood the escalation was caused by all parties involved.
State Sen. Gary Winfield arrived after both Hellamns and Agnew had been released and was taking photos of the demonstration on the station’s steps.
He had not seen the video yet either. “This is just the same stuff that myself and others had been talking about for a very long time,” he said.
Winfield said he wanted to hear the response from police and the city. “We’re concerned by the fact that if you have an interaction with the police, at the point when you’re handcuffed and subdued. It doesn’t matter what happens prior to that,” he said. “We have you, you’re subdued, it ends… I couldn’t do that job. But I think its important to this community to know that you’re there to protect us.”