Newark police left a 10 year old in tears after police chased down and drew guns on him in a case of mistaken identity. The person they were looking for was 6ft tall with dread locks, twice Legend Preston’s age.
His mother Patisha Preston began filmed the shy fifth grader who was obviously distraught.
‘They tried to shoot me, the cops’ the clearly shaken youngster told his mother in the footage, posted to Facebook.
Preston said he was playing basketball with his friends near his home, when cops chasing an armed robbery suspect broke off and charged toward him with their weapons drawn. Preston said he fled down the street to an alley behind his house.
Newark Police pursued the wrong person
Newark Police officers said they pursed Legend because he looked like their suspect but later they claimed that they never pointed their weapons directly at the child.
Friends and neighbors, who saw the chase, formed a human shield around the boy to protect him from the cops, Preston’s mother says.
‘This is a child!’ one neighbor shouted.
‘He’s only 10 years old, how you all chasing him? He’s only a kid. I’m like, that’s messed up,’ another neighbor Jackie Kelly told the cops.
‘They chased down my 10-year-old son with loaded shotguns ready to shoot because they said he matched the description of the over 6 foot tall man, dark skin with long locks… which my son is none of,’ his furious mother Patisha Preston wrote on her Facebook page.
‘They had pictures of the perp whom was in eye sight running down the next block!!! Yet they broke off from chasing the perp to chasing my child.’
She added that when she tried to complain to the officers that their behavior was unacceptable, ‘the best they can tell me is go make a report if I have something to say about it’, she said in the video, taken of her crying son.
Casey Joseph Robinson
The suspect, Casey Joseph Robinson, was eventually apprehended and arrested for an armed robbery charge.
