According to body camera footage obtained by the Associated Press, after two years, motorist Aaron Larry Bowman was struck 18 times with a flashlight by Louisiana state trooper Jacob Brown, who said it was “pain compliance.”
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As previously reported, the beating, which occurred in May of 2019 following a traffic stop, left Bowman with a broken jaw, three broken ribs, a broken wrist, and a slash on the head.
“I’m not resisting! I’m not resisting!” said the man as beaten.
Louisiana State Police Department is not in support of Brown’s actions.
The department said that Brown, who quit in March, “engaged in excessive and unjustifiable actions,” did not report the use of force to his supervisors and, “intentionally mislabeled” his body camera video.
The day of the incident, Brown showed up after deputies had forced Bowman from his vehicle and tackled him to the ground.
Brown got out of his state police car and began beating Bowman on his head and body within two seconds of “initial contact,” wounding up hitting him 18 times in 24 seconds, detectives wrote in an investigative report.
“Give me your f*****g hands!” Brown shouted. “I ain’t messing with you.”
Bowman cried out, saying he was a dialysis patient and was abiding by the law without resisting saying, “I’m not fighting you, you’re fighting me.”
The wayward cop responded to him, saying, “Shut the f**k up!” and “You ain’t listening.”
Bowman continues to cry out, saying, “I’m bleeding. They hit me in the head with a flashlight!”
Brown later reported that Bowman had hit a deputy and that flashlight beating was “pain compliance” to get the man into handcuffs.
Investigators reviewed Brown’s video months after the fact and determined his use of force was not reasonable nor necessary.
Besides failing to report the use of force, Brown also mislabeled his footage as a “citizen encounter,” which investigators called “an intentional attempt to hide the video from any administrative review.”
In an interview, Bowman spoke of the horrific encounter saying,” I kept thinking I was going to die that night.”
“It was like reliving it all over again. By watching it, I broke down all over again,” he said. “I don’t want nobody to go through that.”
Keith Whiddon, Bowman’s lawyer, said he was told initially there was no body-camera video recovered from that night.
Brown reportedly had 23 use-of-force incidents on his record, of which 19 involve a Black person.
He is now undergoing a federal investigation into his conduct, state charges of second-degree battery, and state charges in two other violent arrests of Black motorists besides the charges for the attack on Bowman.
