An off-duty police officer is accused of placing his knee on the neck of a 12-year-old girl to try and restrain her after a school fight at a middle school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to ABC 7.
Officer Shawn Guetschow has resigned from the Kenosha Unified School District as a part-time security guard at Lincoln Middle School, but he is still employed by the Kenosha Police Department.
Video of the incident was shared on social media last week that showed Guetschow putting his knee on a student’s neck. This past weekend, new footage from a surveillance camera in the middle school shows an extended version of the events that occurred.
The video shows two female students fighting in the cafeteria on March 4 before two adults come in to break it up. One of the adults, Guetschow, took one of the students to the ground and placed his knee on her neck while he put handcuffs on her.
Drew DeVinney, the attorney for the girl’s father, Jerrel Perez said she told the officer she couldn’t breathe but the officer continued to push his knee into Perez’s daughter’s neck, according to New York Times.
At a news conference, Mr. Perez said that, “she’s humiliated, she’s traumatized” and that every day his daughter tells him, “Daddy, I don’t want to go to school.”
DeVinney also noted that the restrained by Officer Guetschow mirrored the one used by Derek Chauvin in the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, according to the Times.
Also similar to Minneapolis, this incident occurs in a city that has a troubling past with the police force.
In August 2020, in an incident caught on video, a white police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Although the incident triggered protests across the city, no federal charges were filed against the officer.