Another sad tale of a cop overreacting and a citizen being permanently damaged as a result. In this case, the district attorney appears to be willing to prosecute the officer.
He was once a par golfer, accomplished enough to attract the eyes of those who run the Park Hill Golf Club. Now he wonders whether the kidney will ever function again.
On April 18, at 9:30 p.m., Vasquez had a beer in his hand while with a group of friends on the front porch of a home near West 37th Avenue and Pecos Street when he was spotted by Officer Charles Porter and others from the Denver police gang unit.
Vasquez, who says he’s not a gang member, says he ran because he’s a 16-year-old who knew he was caught with an unopened beer.
The district attorney’s office has said that when Porter caught up to Vasquez, the 12-year veteran officer subdued the 5-foot-6, 130-pound teen and jumped up and down on his back. Vasquez said he had tripped near a fence after being hit with a flashlight by another officer and that he curled up on the ground before Porter started jumping on him.
“I begged, ‘Please, please stop.’ The pain was unbearable,” Vasquez said. “It could have been death if he had done it a couple more times. It would have busted me right open.”
Porter has been charged with felony assault. Vasquez, who had to be rushed to the emergency room, was never cited for the beer, he said.
“His worst crime was being a kid,” said his adult cousin Veronica Gonzales, who, as his legal guardian, has raised him since his mother died when he was 9.
Statistically, the national odds of a police officer being killed in a traffic stop are approximately 1 in 6.5 million, almost lottery winning odds. The case above was not traffic related, more in line with an ‘how dare you defy my authority’ event but these events seem to indicate that the general public has more to fear from the police than the police have to fear from the general public.
