As I scrolled through my Facebook news feed, I discovered the following captioned photo here, being shared by my friend, and fellow Autistic self-advocate, Jason Ross, and originally posted it to my own wall…
ELEVEN DOLLARS
On January 14, 2013, a young man with Down Syndrome went with his companion to see Zero Dark Thirty at the Regal Cinema in Frederick, MD. At the end of the movie, apparently because he wanted to see it again, he refused to get out of his seat. A Regal employee, rather than allowing him to stay and dealing with the situation later with his parents and the companion, called not one, not two, but three off duty Frederick County police officers who were working security for the theater at the time.
According to published reports, when the officers/ security guards asked him to leave, he mouthed off at them and “resisted arrest”. Those of you who know my son Landon can visualize what this would look like. In response, the officers wrestled him to the ground where he asphyxiated in handcuffs. The handcuffs were removed and EMS called and according to the police news release he later died at hospital. I don’t know how that reconciles with the coroner’s finding of asphyxiation which I thought was pretty immediate.
The price of a ticket at the cinema is between $9 and $11. The additional cost to Regal of allowing him to watch the movie again was ZERO. But instead a beloved young man died on the floor of a movie theater in his neighborhood at the hands of people he was taught would protect him.
My Commentary: Rest in Peace, Robert Saylor. It’s a damn shame that you died so young, and so unnecessarily…
“In as much as you have done it to one of the least of my brethren, you have done it unto me.” – יהושוע
What happened to Mr. Saylor is absolutely sickening to the very core, and really boils my blood! It is yet another case of American Fascism, Exposed – revealing the eager escalation to violence that is inherent to all false authority!
Critical thinking demands an answer to the following questions:
In a situation involving a confrontation with off-duty cops that are working as security guards, how exactly is an individual capable of “resisting arrest”?
Also, why are the pigs responsible for this crime “allowed to invoke their rights as police officers not to provide statements even though they were not on duty or performing official duties at the time”?
Aside from this, why was Mr. Saylor treated as though he were a common criminal caught trespassing, or trying to “steal” a viewing of a movie, instead of being seen as a mentally challenged individual who was having difficulty understanding why he would not be allowed to sit through a second viewing of a movie he had already paid to see once?
Why did the pigs responsible for this crime seemingly show no compassion, no patience, and no understanding for Mr. Saylor’s medical condition in their efforts to resolve the issue at hand?
Wouldn’t common sense and good judgment dictate that an individual who may very well have the mind of a child be handled with “kids gloves,” instead of brute force?
Finally, considering the fact that the vast majority of individuals with Down Syndrome have low muscle tone, while almost half have congenital heart disease, and also taking into account Mr. Saylor’s large belly, why would he be left handcuffed lying face-down for ANY PERIOD OF TIME, instead of being turned onto his side, when lying prone in handcuffs is a well-established cause of “positional asphyxia”? Keep in mind that this is information all officers are taught about in their basic training on the restraint of a suspect. A U.S. Department of Justice release on the subject can even be found on the “National Criminal Justice Reference Service” website, relaying the dangers of such restraints, and the need to exercise extreme caution in deploying such tactics: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/posasph.pdf
********UPDATE********
Robert Saylor Homocide: Frederick Deputies Placed on Administrative Leave (February 19th):
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2013/02/robert-saylor-death-frederick-deputies-placed-on-administrative-leave-85414.html
The article above actually originally began with the title, “Robert Saylor Death” but I took the liberty of correcting it, in the interest of accuracy, as I view such language manipulation as the pathetic efforts of boot-licking journalists to downplay a proven MURDER by police officers. This is especially INEXCUSABLE on the part of “investigative journalists” when “the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore” ALREADY “ruled the cause of death as asphyxia and the manner of death as homicide” DAYS AGO, on February 15th:
(All original portions of this work, by Rayn Kleipe, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, while all redistributed links, images, sounds, videos, and writings are protected under 17 U.S.C. § 107: Fair Use, or under Public Domain)
