In a TikTok video that captured the incident, BSO deputy Patrick Keegan is seen grabbing Pace across the neck when the 22-year-old discusses making a cellphone name and tries handy his cellphone to a good friend.
@floridajooka sht inexperienced asf 🤦🏾♂️ #weston #broward #racistpolice ♬ authentic sound – floridajooka
“What the fuck is that?” a witness screams. “Did you see what he did?”
Pace was held face down on the pavement whereas BSO slapped him in handcuffs through the December 22 incident. The sheriff’s workplace booked him on expenses of resisting arrest with out violence and disorderly conduct.
“I simply felt so hopeless within the second,” Pace tells New Times. “It actually traumatized me.”
“I’ve seen this occur so many instances, and I truthfully was in concern for my life,” he says.
The battle started when Pace and his good friend had been accused of smoking marijuana in a toilet on the Bonaventure Town Center Club. The pair had been assembly up with buddies on the fitness center for a exercise and had paid to get in, in keeping with Pace.
“One of the [employees] was like, ‘Do you guys have a weed pen? You guys scent like smoke,'” Pace recounts. “We had been like, ‘No, we simply went to the restroom to pee.'”
Pace says he and his associates had been understanding when the worker came to visit with two law enforcement officials, telling them they needed to go away. He claims the worker chided them whereas they had been being escorted out, saying, “That’s why you guys should not be smoking within the restroom. Don’t come right here anymore.”
According to BSO, the deputies on the scene reported the “group was loud, argumentative, and brought on a disturbance.”
“One of them referred to as the manager director [of the facility] a racist and yelled, ‘Shut yo bitch ass up,'” Veda Coleman-Wright, director of BSO’s public data workplace, stated in an announcement.
Pace says BSO grabbed him and separated him from his associates in response to him allegedly mouthing off on the employees. He remembers telling his associates to be affected person as a result of he thought it was all going to finish easily. They waited close to Pace exterior the constructing whereas he sat in entrance of Keegan, who ordered them to remain again and preserve a couple of toes away from Pace.
“I’m considering that when the remainder of the police come, they’ll hear me out and understand that this case is not as huge as the way it’s being made out to be,” Pace provides. “We by no means did something however that’s not the way it ended up going.”
Pace says that though he paid to enter the fitness center and complied when he was requested to depart, the deputy suggested him he was being detained for trespassing.
“He stored saying he was going to cost me with trespassing,” Pace says. “There’s nothing I might accomplish that I wanted to name my mother to let [her] know that I’m about to get locked up.”
But Pace claims Keegan informed him he couldn’t name anybody. Pace disagreed, saying it was inside his rights to take action. Still seated, he tried handy his cellphone to a good friend.
That’s when the deputy pounced, violently pulling him to the bottom.
The 22-year-old was transported to jail and spent the day behind bars. The expenses are listed as “unfiled” within the county docket, which means state prosecutors might not have decided on whether or not to pursue the case. Pace’s group acquired everlasting trespass warnings, which bar them from returning to the fitness center, per BSO.
Pace, who lives in Coconut Creek and is skilled as a welder, says he thought the deputies had been going to behave professionally and deal with the scenario “maturely as grown males.”
“I did not count on to be slammed,” Pace says.
Coleman-Wright stated BSO’s Weston district workplace is conscious of the video, which has amassed greater than a million views on TikTok.
“Per BSO coverage, district command and coaching division are already reviewing the arrest to find out if the pressure used was in keeping with company coaching and coverage,” Coleman-Wright famous within the assertion.
Deputy Keegan has labored on the pressure since 2002, in keeping with BSO.
This is not the primary time BSO deputies have been accused of extreme pressure after movies of their actions went viral on social media.
In 2019, two deputies had been charged with battery after they had been had been recorded pepper spraying then-15-year-old Delucca Rolle and smashing his face into the bottom exterior a McDonald’s in Tamarac. One deputy had his cost dismissed, whereas the opposite was exonerated at trial this previous July.