Metro officials pepper sprayed a man who was restrained on the floor at Gallery Place station this morning.
Transit police officers observed that the man attempted to enter the station without paying around 8:20 a.m., according to Metro spokesperson Richard Jordan. He said the officers stopped the man, who “failed to comply with police officers’ repeated instructions and became combative,” and the officers used the pepper spray “to subdue the suspect and arrest him.”
A witness, Brianna Musselman, told DCist that she got off a train at the station around 8:45 a.m. and began to videotape the incident, which she posted to Facebook.
When Musselman arrived, the man was already pinned to the floor. She’s unaware of what happened before that point.
The video begins as the man, who is black, is lying on the floor with his hands under his head. Four Metro officials, who all appear to be police officers, are holding him down. One of the officers orders to him put to his hands behind back, yelling “you want to get sprayed again?”
Musselman says before she arrived, they must have sprayed a lot “because I could feel it in my throat a bit… it was the misting kind of spray instead of the direct shot kind.”
The Unsuck DC Metro account tweeted a rider’s account this morning that around 8:50 a.m. at Gallery Place station “I noticed a persistent scratch in my throat and could not stop coughing. I soon noticed that it wasn’t just me—everyone in the station seemed to be coughing or reaching for their water. It only eased up when I began coughing through my mouth and breathing through my sweater…. It was quite frightening!” A number other riders responded that the experienced symptoms as well.
Musselman said that, from her point of view, police pepper sprayed the man because he wouldn’t place his arms behind his back but “his arm was pinned under him… so while they were on top of him, it was hard for him to get his arm out.”
She also said that his face “was probably burning” and it appeared to her that there was no place where someone could assume that he had a weapon, “so yeah, just institutionalized racism at work.”
Musselman said the officer released the spray at least two more times before the man finally put his hands behind his back. He was yelling out and asking repeatedly for water, she said. “From my perspective, this person was suffering unjustly.”
During the next several minutes, the video shows police securing the man’s hands behind his back and sitting him upright. Musselman said the officers questioned him about his name and address, which he answered.
After about six minutes of filming, Musselman said she left the station and went to Walgreens to get the man some water for his eyes.
When she came back, there were more officers who seemed like “reinforcements,” she said, adding that they didn’t appear to be necessary because there were already four cops at the scene. She said an officer would not let her give the man water.
“He insisted that they were about to take him to the hospital because ‘no jail would take him like this,’” Musselman said, adding that she assumed the officer was referring to his “terrible condition.”
She said officers were still on the scene, and other witnesses were recording, when she eventually left for work.
