Man says Beaumont police beating was ‘brutal’

A judge who awarded a $160,000 default judgment last month to a Beaumont man who said his civil rights were violated when he was beaten by a cop will preside over a hearing today that might put the issue back to square one. A clerk in District Court Judge Donald Floyd’s court said that a representative of the Reaud, Morgan and Quinn law firm filed the motion for the hearing, but would not identify the individual.

An attorney at the law office said that he was not aware of anyone at the firm representing any of the five Beaumont police officers named in the lawsuit. The default judgment was entered after all five Beaumont policemen named in Derrick Newman’s lawsuit failed to appear in court personally or by legal representative.  Assistant City Attorney Joseph Sanders said a decision never had been made as to whether the city would represent the officers, and the city was not named in the original lawsuit. Still, the city tried to resolve the matter by offering the 37-year-old Newman a $10,000 settlement, which he refused, attorney Langston Adams said.

At the conclusion of an internal affairs investigation, Police Chief Frank Coffin Jr. sent Newman a letter dated Feb. 20, 2008, saying that a disciplinary review board had said Newman’s allegation of the beating was supported by evidence and that a violation had occurred.

Named in the suit were James Cody Guedry, Charles J. Duchamp III, David Todd Burke, Jason J. Torres and John David Brown. Court documents showed that attempts to serve the men with subpoenas were unsuccessful, and the paperwork later was dropped off at the Beaumont Police Department. The incident occurred about midnight on Aug. 24, 2007, when Newman and two friends were coming back from picking up quesadillas at Cheddar’s Casual Cafe.

Police stopped the Nissan Sentra for failing to yield to an oncoming vehicle, saying it had turned too soon at a green light from Lavaca onto Highland, Newman said Thursday while sitting at a booth at a downtown restaurant. Two officers approached and asked for the three men’s driver’s licenses. The driver was charged with failure to yield, while the back seat passenger had an outstanding warrant and was arrested. It took two officers to do that, and Newman said that he and the driver felt the car being nudged during the encounter. He said he and the driver got out of the car and told the passenger to calm down. After putting the man in the back seat of the patrol car, one of the officers asked Newman to place his hands on the back of the Nissan so that he could be searched. Soon two other patrol cars arrived.

Neman claims Burke was carrying a wooden club when he got out of one car and as soon as he approached, started using it to hit him on his right arm and leg. “To this day, I don’t know what it was that made him strike me,” Newman said. “Once he started hitting me, my mind went blank. Everybody was trying to tell me to get down and be still.” Later, another officer Tasered him twice, he said. Newman said the other officers should have stopped their colleagues. “They weren’t protecting me. They weren’t doing their job. I know if I had tried to protect myself they would have stepped in to protect him,” Newman said.

Newman said once he was in the holding cell, the officer winked and blew kisses at him. Newman was charged with resisting arrest, but those charges later were dropped, he said. Newman said if Terrence Holmes, who represented him on the resisting arrest charge, hadn’t told him that he should file a complaint with the police department’s internal affairs division, he never would have known that he could do it. And he says if the officers hadn’t arrested him, he wouldn’t have filed a complaint.

“I know so many people who got beat up by the laws and didn’t know what to do,” Newman said. “If they don’t take you to jail a lot of people are happy to go home, especially young people.”

Newman eventually saw a copy of the dash camera recording of the incident. “It’s brutal. It’s brutal. A man is getting beat with a stick,” he said as he shook his head. “I’m still upset about it. It was bad. It’s not something I’d want to keep looking at.”

written by Dee Dixon (Beaumont Enterprises)