Seattle high school teacher Jesse Hagopian is suing the city for $500,000 following a weird, seemingly arbitrary incident of him being pepper sprayed while he attending a Martin Luther King Day rally. A video of the incident, obtained by the NAACP, seems to show Hagopian talking on his phone while walking by police when he is suddenly sprayed in the face by one of the officers. If he provoked the attack at all, that was not captured on video, and Hagopian himself said on his Facebook page that he was minding his own business.
At one point after the big main march, group of bike cops set up a line to keep us from marching. Some people walked through the line, but I didn’t. When my phone rang, I turned away from the cops and began walking away to answer the phone. A cop then pepper sprayed me right in the face.”
Hagopian’s lawyer, James Bible, told The Guardian that “We wouldn’t anticipate that there would be an apology in this case. Frankly the Seattle police department has a long history of violating civil rights” …
