A Georgia mother is finally speaking out, months after her teenage son was brutally beaten by an Atlanta police officer following a high-speed chase.
The original incident occurred back in September 2016, but the officer wasn’t fired until July 26 of this year, and now Zabora Brown is demanding action, WSB-TV reports.
“Something needs to be done to him. He needs to go to jail,” Brown said of the officer.
“You kicked him and beat him, and you’re supposed to be who he goes to for protection?” she added.
Matthew Johns was the Atlanta police officer who was caught on dashcam video repeatedly punching and kicking Brown’s son, Antraveious Payne. Brown said that when she arrived at the hospital on Sept. 15, 2016, officers told her that her son’s injuries were from when the stolen BMW he was driving crashed at the end of the pursuit.
However, the video showed that that was a bald-faced lie.
The cameras caught Johns immediately jumping out of a cruiser and running up on Payne before repeatedly kicking and punching him and kneeling on his neck. Officers on the scene said that neither Payne nor the other teens he was with resisted arrest at the time.
“No matter what he was doing, it doesn’t give him the right to kick my son and punch him,” Brown said.
Brown said that as a result of the beating, her son suffered a concussion, and she is also furious that it took so long for the Police Department to get rid of Johns in the first place.
“I don’t give them a pass or a pat on the back that they fired him 10 months later. I think it’s even worse—because they paid for 10 months knowing that he violently beat this young man,” Brown’s lawyer, Shean Williams, told the news station.
Read more at WSB-TV.