An African American college student accuses three Denver police officers of beating him bloody and using racial slurs during a January 2009 traffic stop, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit accuses the officers of stopping 19-year-old Alexander Landau after midnight on Jan. 15, 2009, for making an illegal turn, then calling him the N-word and beating his face and head with their fists, a radio and a flashlight until he was unconscious, according to the lawsuit first reported Wednesday on Westword.com.
The lawsuit contains photographs of Landau just after the incident with a blood-covered face and a swollen eye, wearing a neck brace.
Landau, a student at Community College of Denver, was treated at the hospital for a broken nose, brain bleeding, a concussion, a hemorrhage in his right eye and head lacerations that required several dozen stitches, the lawsuit said.
Landau didn’t have his driver’s license on him and was asked by officers to get out of the car.
Landau was patted down and his friend Ń Addison Hunold Ń told police officers he had a small amount of marijuana on him. Hunold was put in handcuffs.
When one police officer Ń Officer Ricky Nixon Ń started to unlock the trunk of Landau’s car, Landau supposedly asked if he had a warrant while slowly stepping towards the officers with his hands in the air. Two other officers on the scene Ń Corp. Randy Murr, an officer involved in the alleged 2009 beating of Michael DeHerrera, and Officer Tiffany Middleton Ń then grabbed Landau by his arms. During that time Nixon allegedly looked at Landau with a smirk, told him he didn’t have a license and punched him in the face.
The criminal complaint then alleges that Murr “falsely and outrageously yelled” that Landau was going for an officer’s gun, after which Nixon, Murr and Middleton beat Landau. Landau was struck in the face and head many times with the officers’ fists, a radio and a flashlight.
“All three individual defendant officers engaged in this unprovoked attack,” says the complaint. “None of the officers took any steps to protect the plaintiff against the other officer’s use of excessive force, despite being in a position and having a duty to do so.”
When Landau regained consciousness, he was lying in a pool of his own blood. A male officer then supposedly said to him: “Where’s that warrant now, you f***ing ni***r.”
When paramedics arrived on the scene, they documented that Landau was “found lying prone on curbside, handcuffed behind his back,” “bleeding from the head/hematoma” with lacerations. Landau was taken to Denver Health and treated for a broken nose, lacerations and serious head injuries.
When Landau’s parents saw their son’s beaten condition, his father filed a complaint with the Internal Affairs Bureau, reporting the physical and verbal/racist abuse his son supposedly sustained.
Cover up?
The complaint alleges that the involved officers then conspired to have Landau charged for criminal attempt to disarm a police officer.
According to one officer’s report, Landau tried to pull away when officers restrained him. After they fell onto the ground, Nixon said he struck Landau several times in the face but it “had no affect.” Because the punches had no affect, Murr struck Landau in the head with a flashlight several times to restrain him, Nixon reported.
Murr added in his report that hitting Landau in the head with a flashlight also had no affect, nor did choking him with a trained police “carotid technique,” so he had to strike him several more times.
The court complaint implies it’s easy to see the officers made false reports since their account makes it seem the 155-pound teenager was “some kind of unstoppable force with super human powers, who was not able to be subdued by three armed officers and their multiple reinforcements, all with weapons, who were inflicting multiple blows to his face and head with fists, a radio and a flashlight.”
Fallout
The morning after the incident, the district attorney declined to prosecute Landau for attempting to disarm a peace officer based on the officers’ reports. When a detective looked into the case several days later, Nixon said he “spaced” on reporting that he saw a bloody handprint on Middleton’s gun, which would have helped the case against Landau. Nixon reported that Middleton wiped the blood off the gun.
However, Middleton never claimed that Landau touched her gun or that she wiped any blood off of it.
The complaint also points out other seeming contradictions in the police officers’ accounts, including the fact that Middleton initially reported that Landau was “fighting us” and pushed all three officers to the curb, but later reported that “I was never assaulted by Mr. Landau.”
A district attorney ended up accepting charges of attempting to disarm a peace officer against Landau, though those charges were later dropped soon after Landau was granted access to the Internal Affairs files for the involved officers.
The lawsuit targets Nixon, Middleton and Murr, as well as the City and County of Denver and DPD Police Chief Gerald Whitman for creating a culture that allowed such an incident to supposedly happen. The Denver Police Department and Office of the Independent Monitor said they couldn’t comment on the incident because Internal Affairs is conducting an investigation. The Office of the Independent Monitor said an internal investigation was reopened after more information came to light.