Vol. 75/No. 30      August 22, 2011

Demonstrators displayed photos of Thomas’s bloodied, swollen, and unrecognizable face released by his father, Ron Thomas. Protesters carried handmade signs demanding the arrest of the cops involved in the beating and the resignation of Michael Sellers, the Fullerton police chief.

“I am here to support humanity,” said Opal Marsico, a Cal State Los Angeles student. “This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. My brother suffers from schizophrenia, and the police know him and harass him.”

Marisco’s friend Eric Allison said it’s “great news for this fight in Fullerton that five Louisiana cops were just jailed—you know, the ones who beat and killed people during Hurricane Katrina.”

The district attorney’s office is refusing to release surveillance video from the bus depot where Thomas was beaten, claiming that its release could taint witness testimony, according to the Los Angeles Times. Mark Turgeon, an eyewitness, told the Times he saw one officer on top of Thomas and another hitting him with a flashlight on the back of the head.

Turgeon said more officers arrived and Tasered Thomas multiple times, then hogtied him and slammed his face into the concrete. “They just beat and Tasered him until he stopped moving,” Turgeon said.

Videos posted online don’t show the cops but capture sounds of the beating. “You can clearly hear the Tasers going off and Kelly calling out ‘Dad, Dad, Dad’ as they beat him,” said Ron Thomas August 5, standing near a spontaneous memorial for his son at the bus station. “You can hear witnesses saying ‘Why don’t they just handcuff him and arrest him. Why do they keep beating him?’”

Thomas said the cops probably expected to get away with it because they didn’t think a homeless schizophrenic would have any support, “but he does. This was his community. These people knew him, and Kelly had a family.”

“This is very wrong,” said Shabby Shaw, 25, pointing to her sign of Kelly Thomas’s brutalized face at the August 6 protest. “If this is what the police have to offer, maybe we should run things ourselves.”
 
 
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