Tuesday, August 19, 2014
90-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor, Hedy Epstein, Arrested in Ferguson Protest
90-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor, Hedy Epstein, Arrested in Ferguson Protest
Originally published in Tikkun Daily
Aug 18, 2014
Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor and long-time human rights activist, was arrested today in front of Governor Jay Nixon's downtown office along with eight others.
Epstein, charged with failure to disperse, was protesting Nixon's actions in Ferguson, and said after her detainment, "I've been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn't think I would have to do it when I was 90. We need to stand up today so that people won't have to do this when they're 90."...
Thursday, August 07, 2014
San Diego Reader recounts recent adventures of rogue cop Kenneth Davis--and the system that protects him
Murphy Canyon Mystery
"I thought I was being murdered."
Was the man who beat Saikali also issued a citation? No. Could Saikali press charges against the man? No.
Davis then left the ambulance
but not before becoming candid on one point. “He told me that I deserved
my injuries,” Saikali says.
Sergeant Davis is already
known in town for behavior ranging from questionable detainment to
criminal stalking. In 2007, a lawsuit was filed against Davis in federal
court for malicious prosecution. Southeast San Diego resident Melford
Wilson had objected loudly and with obscene language to a drug
investigation Davis was conducting in the neighborhood. The officer
arrested Wilson for obstructing the search. After Wilson sued, the city
attorney’s office was able to have the charges dismissed. But a 2011
appeal in the U.S. Appellate Court’s Ninth Circuit resulted in the
judgment being reversed. A key issue in the case was Wilson’s
constitutional right of free speech. But after the case was remanded to
the district court, a second jury exonerated Davis again.
That same year, however, Davis
didn’t fare as well. In the spring, he was charged with felony stalking
against fellow officer Robin Hayes and was put on a three-year
administrative leave. In a preliminary hearing, Hayes testified that
Davis had also threatened to kill her. Through plea bargaining, Davis
was eventually allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor stalking. On
October 13, 2011, after his trial concluded, NBC San Diego ran a story
headlined, “Officer Stalks and Walks Free.” Davis soon was back at work
on the streets...
After Saikali
arrived at the Sharp Memorial Hospital emergency room, he overheard the
woman he says attacked him talking in a nearby enclosure. She was
bragging again, he says, this time to a nurse, about how her male
companion in the Walmart parking lot was an expert in martial arts.
Saikali could hear that she was being treated for a broken wrist. He
figured she had broken it when he flung her off his back. The first
ambulance at the crime scene must have brought her there, he thought.
Before Saikali left the
hospital, he had the nurse attending him take pictures of his injuries.
Within days, he also wrote a three-page account of what happened both
inside Fry’s and outside Walmart. He then went to the U.S. attorney’s
office, where he was told there was nothing they could do. “I wanted
them to see my injuries firsthand,” he says.
Saikali also called Fry’s and
Walmart to ask that they save the surveillance video of the night he had
been beaten. They promised to do it. When he called Walmart’s security
department three weeks after the incident, he was told that only police
could view the video. Had police come to look at it? No, they had not,
he says the Walmart spokesperson told him...
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