Florida police officers charged over arrests of Black men

FLORIDA

5 officers charged over arrests of Black men

Five Florida police officers have been charged with battery connected to the violent arrests of two Black men last week, prosecutors announced Monday.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced the first-degree misdemeanor charges against Miami Beach police Sgt. Jose Perez, Officer Kevin Perez, Officer Robert Sabater, Officer David Rivas and Officer Steven Serrano. The officers had previously been suspended, and Fernandez Rundle said additional charges might follow. All five officers turned themselves in Monday.

Surveillance video shows an officer chase Dalonta Crudup, 24, into the lobby of the Royal Palm Hotel in South Beach in the early morning hours of July 26. The officer orders Crudup to the ground at gunpoint, and Crudup complies. Moments later, more than a dozen other officers run into the lobby and surround Crudup, who can be seen on the ground with his hands behind his back.

Fernandez Rundle said body-camera footage shows Sgt. Jose Perez kick a handcuffed Crudup three times; Officer Kevin Perez kicked him at least four times.

Fernandez Rundle said surveillance video also shows Khalid Vaughn, 28, using a cellphone to record Crudup’s arrest from about 12 feet away. Body-camera footage shows Vaughn backing away at the instruction of an officer when Sabater tackles Vaughn to the floor and repeatedly punches him. Fernandez Rundle said Rivas and Serrano also struck Vaughn.

Officers said they initially followed Crudup into the hotel because he struck a bicycle patrol officer while driving a scooter recklessly. That officer was taken to a hospital for treatment of leg injuries. Crudup was charged with several counts, including aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer.

Charges against Vaughn of resisting an arrest with violence and impeding a police investigation have been dropped.

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— Associated Press

IOWA

New trial request denied in Tibbetts case

A judge on Monday rejected a convicted man’s request for a new trial in the 2018 killing of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, whose body was found in a cornfield weeks after she disappeared while out for a run near her small hometown.

Judge Joel Yates’s ruling cleared the way for sentencing to proceed Aug. 30 in the trial of Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who was convicted in May of first-degree murder in Tibbetts’s death. The former farmhand, who came to the United States illegally as a teenager, faces a sentence of life in prison.

Yates rejected efforts by Bahena Rivera’s attorneys to implicate others, saying much of the evidence they presented after he was convicted was known to them before the verdict was made. To grant a new trial, any additional evidence would have to be new and revealed after the verdict, he wrote.

The judge also said many of the new allegations conflicted with trial testimony and evidence presented by Bahena Rivera’s own witnesses.

During questioning by police, Bahena Rivera acknowledged that he encountered Tibbetts as she was running near her small eastern Iowa hometown of Brooklyn, which is about 65 miles east of Des Moines, and he led investigators to the field where her body lay hidden under cornstalks.

But during his trial, he claimed publicly for the first time that two masked men kidnapped him at gunpoint from his trailer, forced him to drive to where Tibbetts was running on a rural road, killed her, put her body in his trunk and made him dispose of it. He said he didn’t tell investigators about the two men earlier because they had threatened to kill his
ex-girlfriend and young daughter.

Bahena Rivera was to be sentenced last month. But toward the end of the testimony portion of his trial, two new witnesses came forward independently of one another and told police that a local
21-year-old man told them he had killed Tibbetts. Defense lawyers requested a new trial based on that and other newly discovered information, and Yates agreed to postpone sentencing while he considered their request.