By Arturo Garcia
In a scene that brought with it echoes of the Los Angeles Police Department’s most infamous moment, residents filmed four officers holding down and punching a young man picked up outside his home for allegedly skateboarding on the wrong side of the street.
According to KTLA-TV, a protest is being planned for Monday in support of 19-year-old Ronald Weekley Jr. after the beating was captured on a cell phone Saturday.
“If you see the videotape, there are about three or four officers on top of my son,” Weekley’s father, Ronald Weekley Sr., said. “Then an officer comes into view, gets down on the ground and hits him in his face, and that’s something you can hear on the tape. The results are, is that he has a broken nose, he has a broken cheekbone and he has a concussion.”
Weekley was cited with resisting arrest.
The footage aired by KTLA shows two officers holding the younger Weekley down and another punching him in the face. A fourth officer standing atop the fray can be seen speaking into his radio. Another officer enters the frame seemingly ordering the unidentified resident filming the incident to move away. It is reminiscent of the seminal video of the traffic stop that propelled Rodney King into the national consciousness.
“I was like screaming because I thought they were going to kill him,” one witness said of the police’s treatment of Weekley. KTLA’s report, posted on Monday, can be seen below: