Aimee Ortiz

BART’s general manager, Bob Powers, said in a statement that “eating in the paid area is banned and there are multiple signs inside every station saying as much” and that the officer “asked the rider not to eat while he was on the platform responding to another call.”

“It should have ended there, but it didn’t,” he added, explaining that the man “did not stop eating and the officer moved forward with the process of issuing him a citation.”

Powers said the man who was eating refused to provide identification and “cursed at and made homophobic slurs at the officer who remained calm through out the entire engagement.”

Still, he noted that “context is key” and indicated that the officer might have gone too far.

“Enforcement of infractions such as eating and drinking inside our paid area should not be used to prevent us from delivering on our mission to provide safe, reliable, and clean transportation,” he said, adding that he was disappointed about “how the situation unfolded.”

Phone calls and messages sent to BART were not immediately returned Monday evening. Attempts to reach the man, identified by local media reports as Steve Foster, were unsuccessful.

In an interview with ABC 7 News, Foster said that he was not accepting the transit agency’s apology.

“The story got flipped,” he said, adding that he feels like “we’re kind of past the point of no return now.”

Foster is now considering taking legal action against BART, ABC 7 news reported.

The 15-minute video of the episode shows an officer holding the handle of a man’s backpack and telling him, “You are detained, and you’re not free to go.”

“You singled me out, out of all these people,” the man, who had a sandwich in his hand, told the officer.

“You’re eating,” the officer said.

As the video continues, the officer told the man that he was going to jail for resisting arrest.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” the man said as he repeatedly asked the officer to release the handle of his backpack.

Later in the video, the man, who had cursed at the officer and asked to speak with his supervisor, is seen being handcuffed by a group of police officers.

“Four cops for eating a sandwich,” the person recording the episode said.

At the end of the video, the man is seen being taken into a room with a yellow door. The man received a citation after the Nov. 4 confrontation, according to BART officials, who also said that the man was not arrested.

“We have confirmed w/ the Deputy Chief he was not arrested. He was cited for eating, which is a violation of state law,” the transit agency shared on its verified Twitter page last week. “No matter how you feel about eating on BART, the officer saw someone eating and asked him to stop, when he didn’t he was given a citation.”

The video, which garnered 3 million views on Facebook as of Monday night, caused an uproar and inspired activists to stage a lunchtime “eat-in” protest over the weekend.

Images and videos posted to social media Saturday show several people enjoying sandwiches on a train platform. Janice Li, who was elected to the BART board of directors in 2018, was among those at the protest.

Li said on Twitter that she “won’t comment on this case specifically, but broadly speaking, enforcing the no drinking/eating rule is not how we fix BART.”

“Enforcement is a function of the way resources are allocated vs what the laws are,” she said, adding that “there are WAY bigger issues at BART than enforcing no drinking/eating.”

The BART controversy over the eating citation comes as the New York City Police Department is facing criticism for its crackdown on crime and fare evasion on the subway.

In June, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the deployment of 500 extra police officers to patrol New York City’s subway. But videos of physical confrontations between passengers and uniformed police officers have touched a nerve in the city. A protest was held Monday in support of a woman who was handcuffed for selling churros — a fried dough treat — inside a subway station last week.

This article originally appeared in

BART Apologizes for Handcuffing Man Eating Sandwich on a Train Platform

The general manager of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system apologized Monday to a man who was detained and handcuffed by a police officer last week after he was seen eating a sandwich on the train platform — an episode captured in a video that was widely shared and that prompted a weekend protest.

The woman, Samantha Louise Eley, yelled and cursed at the teenagers, who were using a swingset on the playground Oct. 16 at Dream Park in Fort Worth and said she was a police officer, the video shows.

Dressed in blue and white running shorts, Eley, 38, is heard at the beginning of the video telling the teenagers to “stop.”

“It’s a children’s park,” she said. “Stop now.”

Eley is seen walking over to a swing that someone is playing on, then slamming her hands on it to abruptly stop it.

“We are children,” one of the teenagers told Eley, who cursed at the group and insisted that they were not children.

As the teenagers began protesting her actions, Eley turned, cursed again and declared herself “PD.”

Using an expletive, she told the teenagers to get “out of here now if you’re not here to play as a child.”

In the video, one teenager in the group is seen telling Eley that she is 16 years old.

“Right,” Eley replied before cursing and telling the girl that she’s “not a child.”

Eley told the 16-year-old that she could “literally arrest” her as an adult.

“Which is your choice?” she continued. “Are you a child or a goddamn adult? Go now! Get out of here!”

The one-minute video, which has been viewed more than 5 million times and spawned the nickname “Swingset Susan” for the woman, is reminiscent of other widely seen videos in which white people have called police on black people as they go about participating in everyday activities or events. The people in those episodes also inspired sobriquets, including, “Golf Cart Gail,” “Cornerstore Caroline,” “BBQ Becky” and “Permit Patty.”

One day after Eley’s outburst at the playground, the Fort Worth Police Department confirmed on Twitter that she was not a police officer and that they were investigating the matter.

Police tracked down one of the teenagers in the video, who then picked Eley out of a photo lineup as the woman screaming in the video, according to a police arrest warrant affidavit.

The teenager told Detective B. Cantu that she believed Eley was a police officer and left the park with her friends because of the confrontation, according to the affidavit.

Cantu went to speak with Eley on Oct. 22, but she “refused to be interviewed at that time,” the affidavit said.

Eley was charged Wednesday. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the case. Calls to Eley’s home and her lawyer Friday evening were not immediately returned.

'Swingset Susan' Threatened to Arrest Hispanic Teens. Now She's Charged With Impersonating a Public Servant.

A white woman from Texas who was seen berating and threatening to arrest a group of Hispanic teenagers for playing at a park in a widely shared video was charged this week with impersonating a public servant, police said.

For decades, the spot was unmarked, but in 2008, signs detailing Emmett’s harrowing journey were installed around the region, and for the first time there was a memorial to the African-American teenager whose death galvanized the civil rights movement.

But the sign at the Tallahatchie River location was stolen and thrown into the river.

A replacement was soon marred with bullet holes.

Then came a third, which was hit with more bullets.

Now, there’s a fourth sign, this one made of steel. It weighs more than 500 pounds. It’s over an inch thick, and, the manufacturer says, it’s bulletproof.

The dedication of the new sign opened old wounds for his cousins, including Ollie Gordon, 71, and her daughter, Airickca Gordon-Taylor, 50. They traveled to Mississippi from Chicago, Emmett’s hometown, for the ceremony.

“What they did to Emmett was so ugly that even the Tallahatchie River spewed his body back out so he could be seen and found,” Gordon-Taylor said Sunday. She runs the Mamie Till Mobley Memorial Foundation, which is named in honor of Emmett’s mother.

“Vandalism is a hate crime,” she said. “Basically my family is still being confronted with a hate crime against Emmett Till and it’s almost 65 years later.”

The family has never healed from Emmett’s murder, the mother and daughter said.

Gordon was 7 years old when her cousin was brutally killed after Carolyn Bryant Donham, a white woman, said the teenager had grabbed her and wolf-whistled at her. In 2017, she told a historian that her allegations against Emmett were false.

Gordon, who was raised in the same house as Emmett, remembers her cousin as a food-loving jokester who protected her like a brother would.

“We grew up like siblings because we were all in the same house together,” Gordon said. “He was superprotective.”

Emmett’s death was confusing for Gordon when she was a child. She remembers hearing screams in her otherwise peaceful home. It was also her first brush with death.

She said she and her brothers thought that white people were coming to get them.

“We still didn’t really absorb what was going on; we were children,” she said. “When the body came, we started to have nightmares.”

The two white men who were accused of murdering Emmett were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury.

Now, as a grown woman with children, Gordon still carries the sadness and grief of her cousin’s murder, particularly when she thinks of his mother.

“We didn’t have any counseling, which I think we should have had because I still have these crying episodes,” she said, adding that Emmett’s mother “cried every day.”

“I still have sadness for her pain, losing a child, I can’t imagine losing my child,” Gordon said.

Dave Tell, a University of Kansas professor who has written about Emmett, wrote the text that accompanies the new sign. He said it has become particularly important to tell Emmett’s story in full through 2019.

“The story of Emmett Till can’t be confined to 1955,” he said, adding that “the bullet holes are important, too.”

“Till’s story is still going. It’s still very divisive in Mississippi and across the country,” Tell said.

Memory sites, like the one marked by the new memorial sign, “have become the new lunch counters,” Tell said, explaining that lunch counters across the South were “where our country worked out its racial politics.”

The new sign was made by Lite Brite Neon, which has locations in Brooklyn and Kingston, New York.

The sign is made out of half an inch of AR500 steel and covered in an acrylic panel that’s three-quarters of an inch thick, according to the Emmett Till Memory Project. “The sign is designed to withstand a rifle round without damage,” the project’s site said.

In 2014, Tell began working closely with the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which grew out of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission. The commission installed the first signs with the actor Morgan Freeman, who helped fund the project.

Ceremonies like the one Saturday provide the family with a sense of gratification, Gordon-Taylor said.

“OK, you want to shoot it down? We’re going to put it right back up,” she said. “You’re never going to forget about Emmett Till and that he was here. Our family has never received judicial justice from the state of Mississippi for Emmett’s murder, so, in some form, this is us saying, ‘Until you do right by us, basically, you’re never going to forget.’”

Emmett Till Memorial Has a New Sign. This Time, It's Bulletproof.

Emmett Till’s family stood on the shore of the Tallahatchie River just outside of Glendora, Mississippi, on Saturday. It was there, that, it is believed, the body of 14-year-old Emmett was pulled from the water after he had been kidnapped, tortured and lynched nearly 65 years ago.

Wedding guests had the gunman pinned down when officers arrived at the New England Pentecostal Ministries church in Pelham, New Hampshire, about 30 miles north of Boston, Chief Joseph Roark of the Pelham Police Department said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.

The suspect, a man who police said used a handgun, was in custody. He was not publicly identified nor was a motive revealed, but police said the shooting did not appear to be random.

Police received a call of an active shooter at the church at 10:12 a.m. and found a man and woman with gunshot wounds. Their identities and conditions were not made publicly available.

But in a Facebook post, Neivia Choate, a relative of one of the victims, wrote: “A coward walked into my family’s church today at NEP New England Pentecostal Church and shot my uncle Bishop Stanley Choate. I call for anyone that knows and believes and In the GOD we serve to get on your knees and pray for my family.”

Darius Mitchell, who said his family was close with Stanley Choate, said the church and its bishop were well known in the African-American community of Lowell, Massachusetts, which is about 10 miles away. Mitchell said that the bishop was being treated at Lowell General Hospital.

In a statement, the hospital said it had received one patient from the shooting and that person had been transferred to a hospital in Boston.

In a peculiar twist, Choate was the second leader from New England Pentecostal Ministries to be shot in less than two weeks. Luis Garcia, a minister and member of the church, was shot and killed last week. On Saturday, the church had been scheduled to host a “celebration of life” service for Garcia at noon.

Police have charged a man, Brandon Castiglione, in connection with Garcia’s murder, television station WMUR reported.

Police provided the church with active shooter training within the last year, Roark said.

2 Shot at Wedding in New Hampshire Church, Police Say

A Saturday morning wedding at a church in a small New Hampshire town came to a bloody and abrupt stop when a gunman entered and opened fire, injuring at least two people before he was “gang-tackled” by attendees, police said.

Darius Mitchell, who said his family was close with Stanley Choate, said the church and its bishop were well known in the African-American community of Lowell, Massachusetts, which is about 10 miles away. Mitchell said that the bishop, who was a 1963 graduate of Lowell High School, was being treated at Lowell General Hospital.

In a statement, the hospital said it had received one patient from the shooting and that person had been transferred to a hospital in Boston. It said it could not disclose any other details.

The shooting was the latest in a series of acts of violence to occur at houses of worship. In 2018, a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh left 11 dead and in 2017, a shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, left 26 dead.

In Pelham, police provided the church with active shooter training within the last year, Roark said. The community, which is near the Massachusetts border and has a population of just over 13,000, was a farming community up until World War II, “when explosive growth in population and industry took hold and has yet to slow down,” according to its website.

Police have charged a man in connection with Garcia’s murder, television station WMUR reported.

Garcia was trying to help the man, Brandon Castiglione, Choate had told the station. The bishop said Castiglione, 24, who was charged with second-degree murder, “was having some problems mentally, and Luis was there to try to help him out.”

In an interview with television station WCVB, Geraldo Pagan said he had arrived at the church for the service for Garcia and was told by police that “everything has been canceled.” He said he was shocked to see all the police activity as he pulled up to the church.

“I’m deeply disturbed to hear about the shooting in Pelham this morning,” U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire wrote on Twitter. “Today was supposed to serve as a celebration of the life of Minister Luis Garcia. This senseless violence can’t continue — my prayers are with the victims of this terrible attack.”

A suspect was in custody, Police Chief Joseph Roark of the Pelham Police Department said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon.

Police received a call of an active shooter at 10:12 a.m. at the New England Pentecostal Ministries church, he said. Officers found a man and woman with gunshot wounds at the church. Other guests suffered minor injuries.

The identities of the gunman and victims were not publicly available. A motive for the shooting was not immediately known but the chief said the shooting did not appear random.

The Pelham police provided the church with active shooter training within the last year, Roark said.

In a Facebook post, Neivia Choate wrote: “A coward walked into my family’s church today at NEP New England Pentecostal Church and shot my uncle Bishop Stanley Choate I call for anyone that knows and believes and In the GOD we serve to get on your knees and pray for my family.”

Pelham, which is more than 30 miles north of Boston and is near the Massachusetts border, has a population of just over 13,000.

The church and its bishop are well known in the African-American community of Lowell, Massachusetts, said Darius Mitchell, who said his family was close with Stanley Choate. Mitchell said that the bishop was being treated at Lowell General Hospital.

Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire wrote on Twitter that state officials were responding to the shooting scene, which remained “very active.”

The church was also scheduled to host a “celebration of life” service at noon for Luis Garcia, according to an obituary posted to Legacy.com and originally published in The Boston Globe on Monday. Garcia, a minister who, according to the obituary, was a member of New England Pentecostal Ministries, was shot and killed last week.

On Twitter, the New York Police Department Counterterrorism Bureau said it was “closely monitoring the shooting incident at the New England Pentecostal church in Pelham, NH.” A spokeswoman said the department routinely monitors shootings.

2 Shot at Church Wedding in New Hampshire, Police Say

A gunman opened fire during a wedding ceremony on Saturday morning at a church in Pelham, New Hampshire, injuring two people before he was subdued by guests attending the celebration, police said.

“I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla, so I may lose it here in a sec,” the officer said, according to The East Bay Times. “If someone else is able, can they maneuver into the No. 1 spot?”

A police sergeant called off the chase minutes after that radio transmission. The next week, national headlines appeared to blame the electric vehicle.

“Cop’s Tesla runs out of battery power during high-speed chase,” read one headline, in The New York Post.

“Tesla police vehicle ran out of power during a car chase in California,” read another, from ABC News.

“Tesla squad car runs out of battery chasing suspect at high speed, California cops say,” The Kansas City Star reported.

But according to the police department at the heart of the story, that is not what happened.

“At no time did the Tesla end up having to leave the pursuit, it didn’t die on the freeway, and it really didn’t impact this pursuit in any way,” Geneva Bosques, a spokeswoman for the Fremont Police Department, said on Monday.

“It’s the fastest car we have in our fleet and it handles really well in pursuits,” she said.

The Fremont police said the electric vehicle’s low battery was no different from a traditional car running out of gas, getting a flat tire or having other mechanical issues during a pursuit.

“This situation, while embarrassing, is no different from cases where a patrol car runs low (or even dry) of fuel,” the department said in a statement last Thursday.

Fremont, about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco, is home to a sprawling Tesla plant.

It was late on Sept. 20 when a police officer from the town spotted a car being sought in nearby Santa Clara in connection with a felony. The vehicle, a Toyota Avalon, triggered an alert when it crossed into Fremont city limits. Officers had already been instructed to be on the lookout for the vehicle when Officer Jesse Hartman spotted it in the parking lot of a local auto parts store, Bosques said.

After Hartman tried to stop the wanted vehicle, the driver took off, setting off an 8-minute, 10-mile chase. The car sped onto Interstate 680, reaching speeds over 110 mph, according to police.

Hartman soon had backup, Bosques said. Shortly after two additional Fremont Police Department vehicles joined the chase, Hartman’s Tesla alerted him that the vehicle’s charge was running low. Minutes later, after the Avalon drove onto the shoulder of the freeway in order to pass a vehicle, the police sergeant called off the chase “to ensure public safety.”

The California Highway Patrol had been on its way to respond to the chase when it was called off, Bosques said. That agency later found the vehicle abandoned in the area.

The Fremont police said in their first statement that the Tesla, which had been at the city’s corporation yard earlier that day, had a 50% charge when Hartman picked it up at the beginning of his 11-hour shift, but Bosques said on Monday that the vehicle’s charge was actually higher than that. The chase took place about 9 hours into his shift, she said.

“We think it started the pursuit with about 50 miles left on the charge, but when cars accelerate at speeds such as the situation, going over 110 miles per hour, the car charge starts to drain down faster,” Bosques said. And before the chase, Hartman had driven around more than usual for a shift, she added.

It was the second pursuit for the department’s Tesla, which Bosques said “has never fully lost a battery charge during any type of call for service.”

Fremont police officers have been impressed with the Tesla, she said, and have called it a “game changer for pursuits.” She also said that the officers involved in the Sept. 20 chase had recently stopped a vehicle while using the Tesla.

That driver, Bosques said, told officers, “I saw the Tesla behind me, I knew I couldn’t get away from a Tesla.”

Tesla declined to comment for this article, but a week after the pursuit, Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, tweeted an article from a website devoted to Tesla news, rumors and reviews that referred to the Fremont Police Department’s accounting of the event.

“Meanwhile, back in reality,” he wrote.

The Fremont Police Department was the first in the nation to use a Tesla as a patrol vehicle, Bosques said. The agency bought a used 2014 Tesla Model S 85 in late 2017 as part of its commitment to a City of Fremont climate change initiative, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020.

The Fremont police began transitioning to hybrid vehicles in 2009, and the Tesla was officially deployed as part of the fleet in March 2019. The department’s six-month pilot program with the Tesla will help the agency determine if the vehicles provide the range and durability law enforcement needs.

A Police Tesla Nearly Ran Out of Power During a Chase. The Department Isn't Worried.

A California police officer driving a Tesla Model S during a high-speed chase on a Bay Area freeway radioed to his colleagues that he was running low on battery. He needed someone else to take over.

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Aimee Ortiz

Articles written by the author

BART Apologizes for Handcuffing Man Eating Sandwich on a Train Platform

'Swingset Susan' Threatened to Arrest Hispanic Teens. Now She's Charged With Impersonating a Public Servant.

Emmett Till Memorial Has a New Sign. This Time, It's Bulletproof.

2 Shot at Wedding in New Hampshire Church, Police Say

2 Shot at Wedding in New Hampshire Church, Police Say

2 Shot at Church Wedding in New Hampshire, Police Say

A Police Tesla Nearly Ran Out of Power During a Chase. The Department Isn't Worried.