This isn’t David Eric Casebolt's first rodeo with regard to accusations of harboring racial biases and exerting excessive force with African Americans.
Casebolt—the McKinney, Texas, police corporal who was initially suspended, and then resigned, after a video went viral showing him violently shoving a teenage girl to the ground after a pool party—was sued back in 2008 by a black man who says Casebolt racially profiled him and used excessive force during his arrest, the International Business Times reports.
Casebolt was initially identified in media reports as Eric Casebolt, but according to the International Business Times, court documents show Eric is his middle name.
In court documents, Albert Earl Brown Jr. described how, in April 2007, he was sitting in a car with white female passengers, when Casebolt approached the vehicle and made comments about Brown’s clothes and the white women Brown was with.
In court documents, Brown said that Casebolt asked to search the car after allegedly seeing marijuana seeds, yet Brown maintained that Casebolt didn’t find any drugs after the car search. Brown alleged that Casebolt pulled down Brown’s pants to conduct a body search while another officer slammed Brown’s face into the hood of the car. In response to the complaint, Casebolt said that he did, in fact, find marijuana seeds inside Brown’s car.
Brown was convicted of a drug charge stemming from that arrest, but he still filed a civil rights lawsuit against Casebolt and the other police officers present during the arrest. Brown argued that Casebolt conjured up a “fake charge” in order to cover up how badly and inappropriately Casebolt and the officers had treated Brown during the stop and arrest.
The lawsuit was dismissed because Brown said he was incarcerated and unable to collect all of the evidence he needed to prove his case. Brown also said he didn’t understand the legal process enough to follow through with the suit, the International Business Times reports. Later that year, Casebolt won the Patrolman of the Year award, according to the International Business Times.
Casebolt resigned as a result of his conduct during the recent pool-party incident recorded by cellphone video, in which he is seen aggressively restraining African-American teenagers.
Read more at the International Business Times.