Two Groveland, Fla., police officers allegedly used excessive force against an 11-year-old girl while responding to a call at her home on Sunday, resulting in an internal investigation of the Police Department, WFTV reports.
According to the news station, the police went to the house after the burglary alarm accidentally went off. The family said that officers went into the house through the garage door. Inside the house they found the little girl, who remains unidentified, watching TV on her bed.
"One of the officers was pushing me down, and when he was pushing me down, he put his knee on me and the other officer had his gun pointed at me," the soft-spoken child told the news station.
Her father, Jean Guirand, is furious at the way his daughter was treated and says that the girl is traumatized. “Someone should get fired for doing something like that,” he told WFTV.
Groveland police launched an internal investigation after the case began to get more scrutiny.
The officers involved, James Festa and John Rigdon, are three-year veterans at the department, and WFTV uncovered that both men have a history of problems in their personnel files. Rigdon was reprimanded in May 2014, demoted from corporal to officer in 2013 and reprimanded in 2011, each time for allegedly filing false police reports, WFTV notes. Festa was disciplined in December 2014 after reported careless handling of a child-abuse investigation.
Investigators are supposed to be interviewing the young girl on Monday about the incident.
Read more at WFTV.