So, What Color Was The Car?
IT WAS A STORY that wouldn't stand still. All we know for sure is that a scooter cop ended up in the hospital last Monday with serious head and face injuries.
Earlier Monday evening, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) took their United Nations rally on the road, marching up and down and all about the town. That's well established. It's when they hit the police barricades at 30th St. and 8th Ave. that the stories start going in all sorts of crazy directions.
According to Tuesday's Daily News, when protesters reached the barricades, "troublemakers" within the group attempted to push their way through. Police grabbed them, and others marchers began chanting "Let them go," before jumping on plainclothes Detective William Sample. The mob pulled him from his scooter and began kicking and hitting him in the head.
According to 1010 WINS that same day, protesters threw the barricade at the detective, knocking him from his scooter. A police spokesperson reported that they then began stomping the prone man.
Protesters at the scene, also quoted by 1010 WINS, claim that police on scooters and in full riot gear were driving into the demonstrators in an effort to split them up, running over several marchers in the process.
The official NYPD account cited in the Post claims that the officer was "knocked from" his scooter somehow by protesters before the kicking and punching started. But the Post also quotes one of the protesters, who claims that Sample accidentally ran into one of the marchers with his scooter and tipped over. The scooter fell across another protester, and the woman who was initially struck "freaked out."
Still another marcher cited in the Post claims that the incident occurred after Sample found himself trapped and overwhelmed between marchers still moving uptown toward the barricades, and those who'd already been turned back and were heading downtown.
Video footage aired on Ch. 7's 5 o'clock news Tuesday evening showed what appeared to be a single demonstrator whaling on an undercover, plainclothed Det. Sample. A Ch. 7 reporter stated that, though Sample was in plainclothes, the assailant "somehow knew that he was a police officer." In the footage, another NYPD officer grabs the assailant, but lets him free a moment later.
The next morning, following the arrest of the assailant-19-year-old Jamal Holiday-at a Tuesday night rally in Union Square, the story had changed again. Now, according to the Post, Sample and several other officers were scootering into the crowd in response to a distress call from a fellow officer, who'd found herself surrounded by "hooligans." The Daily News added that Sample, on an unmarked scooter, was indeed driving into the crowd when someone pushed him down and began beating him.
More complete video footage of the incident shown on the evening news Wednesday night clearly shows Sample-wearing a hockey jersey and astride an unmarked scooter-plowing through the crowd before being knocked off the bike and attacked by Holiday.
And Thursday morning's Post, still insisting a mob attacked Sample, quotes an NYPD spokesman, who now claimed that Sample was responding to a distress call from several officers who were being attacked by protesters.
Got that?