A grandfather accused of shoplifting ended up on the floor choking on his own blood after police tackled him to the ground during a Black Friday sale at, you guessed it, Wal-Mart.
There’s a touch of mystery surrounding this particular example of Black Friday-fueled ultraviolence, gentle readers, so let’s go over what we know. At some point during the sales scrimmage at a Wal-Mart store in Buckeye, Arizona, 54-year-old grandfather Jerald Newman placed a videogame in the waistband of his trousers. A police officer stationed in the store noticed this, approached Newman, accused him of shoplifting, clapped on the cuffs and, shortly thereafter, invited him to take a closer look at Wal-Mart’s interesting concrete floor. The video to the right shows the result- Newman lying on the floor, choking on his own blood.
“They grabbed the guy, body planted him into the ground — face shatters on concrete. That’s a hard concrete floor inside Walmart,” said one witness. “All of a sudden, you see this little boy run up and wailing and yelling, ‘Grandpa, Grandpa,’ and crying his eyes out.”
This is where it gets a little hazy. Some witnesses are claiming Newman only placed the videogame in his waistband in order to grab his grandson, who was being trampled in the sales-driven mayhem. The police tell a slightly different story: they’re claiming Newman was flailing his arms and resisting arrest – though you have to wonder exactly how much arrest resisting warrants a man being made into the filling in a cop and concrete sandwich.
“There’s nothing on the surface to indicate our officer did anything inappropriate,” said a police spokesman. “It’s difficult to arrest an individual because you don’t know how that individual is going to react.”
Newman was arrested formally for shoplifting and resisting arrest after being treated at a local hospital. He was released from jail in the early hours of Saturday morning.
I admit, I’m grimly interested in what game sparked the violence. Police brutality over a copy of Skyrim is one thing, but having your face crushed because of a discount copy of Rapala Fishing Frenzy 2009? That would be just awful.
Source: CNN thanks to reader: j-e-f-f-e-r-s
