A Dallas, Texas, man was picking up breakfast for his young children when he says police officers pulled him over, beat him and tased him with a stun gun after mistaking him for a domestic violence suspect with a similar name.
Silvester Hayes, a 27-year-old single father of four children, was then wrongly arrested even after police realized their mistake, according to a federal lawsuit he filed last week against the city and multiple police officers.
The incident on Oct. 16, 2021, cost Hayes his job as a security guard and his home, the lawsuit says.
“It knocked me all the down. It kind of ruined my life,” Hayes said in a video statement.
“Just to be treated like that is traumatizing. To this day I still have dreams about that, I mean, I wake up out my sleep,” he said.
The Dallas Police Department said it does not comment on pending litigation. The City and the police union did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.
Hayes said he was driving to a restaurant a few blocks from his home for some French toast and bacon when two Dallas police officers stopped him for failing to signal at a stop sign, according to the lawsuit and police body camera videos Hayes’ attorney shared with NBC News.
The officers, Walter Paul Guab and Holly Harris, are named in the suit, and Hayes called the officer’s reasoning for pulling him over “suspicious” and “obviously manufactured,” the suit says. Instead, he believes he was racially profiled.
Hayes gave Guab his driver’s license and told him he had a lawfully registered firearm with him, according to the lawsuit. The suit says that Guab handed the driver’s license to Harris, who failed to run it through the computer database in her vehicle. Instead, Harris mistook Hayes for a man named “Sylvester,” who had a family violence warrant.
Acting on the incorrect information, Guab suddenly reached inside Hayes’ car and tried to open the driver’s side door, according to the lawsuit. Hayes was “alarmed by this sudden escalation in aggression” and repeatedly asked what was happening, the suit says.
“Instead of providing Plaintiff Hayes with an explanation for forcibly removing him from his vehicle, Defendant Officers Guab and Harris escalated their use of force against Plaintiff Hayes,” according to the suit.
As the two officers were “manhandling” Hayes, several more officers arrived at the scene and frantically started screaming “gun” when they spotted Hayes’ firearm in his vehicle, the lawsuit says.
“In a proverbial case of gasoline being poured on a fire, having multiple Dallas Police Officers yelling ‘gun’ only escalated the Officers’ use of excessive force on Plaintiff Hayes,” the suit says.
The body camera videos show the officers yank Hayes out of his vehicle and onto the ground, with his head smashed against the curb, before placing him in handcuffs. One officer is seen with his knee placed on Hayes’ neck. The lawsuit says that some of the officers kicked, punched and used their Tasers on Hayes. NBC News could not verify this from the videos.
During the melee, Hayes’ arm was pulled from the socket, according to the lawsuit. At certain points in the video, Hayes is heard begging for help.
The officers use a zip tie to bind Hayes’ feet and then place him in the back of a police car, the video shows. It was then that Harris ran Hayes’ driver’s license. When she realized her mistake, she allegedly said “F—, we got the wrong guy.”
Officers Guab and Harris could not be reached at phone numbers listed for them.
In one of the videos, three officers are heard discussing whether Hayes is a felon and what charges they can bring against him.
“Is he a felon?” an unidentified officer asks.
“He has not been convicted,” Guab responds. “Or, no felon?”
“No felon,” the unidentified officer says, before asking Guab about a charge of resisting arrest.
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to put the resisting because you can’t resist detention,” Officer Guab says.
During the encounter, Hayes also repeatedly says, “I’ll get in the car,” body camera video shows.
The lawsuit says that Hayes was ultimately charged with resisting arrest and unlawful possession of a weapon and held in jail for several days. The charges were dismissed more than a year later, according to the lawsuit.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
