A man from Florida who was badly beaten by Jacksonville sheriff’s officers in a video that went viral last year sued the officers in federal court on Thursday, saying they violated his rights in a brutal way.
Le’Keian Woods, 25, was arrested in September 2023 and later found guilty of misdemeanor resisting police without violence.
In the lawsuit, Woods’ lawyers said that the arrest caused him a type of traumatic brain injury, a ruptured kidney, nerve damage, and other harm. A witness recorded the event on video, which shows Woods with his hands tied and his face and eyes swollen and bloody.
“All of that was not justified,” Woods’ lawyer Harry Daniels said of the actions of the police, who hit him with fists, knees, and elbows after he ran away from a traffic stop and was tasered.
At a news conference Thursday with his lawyers, Woods said he ran because he thought he would be shot during the traffic stop. He said he does not feel bad about what he did that day. At the time, police reports said Woods had been hit at least 17 times.
The lawsuit did not say that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office did anything wrong; it only said that certain officers did. The suit says that Woods was hurt too badly by officers Josue Garriga, Hunter Sullivan, Trey McCullough, and Beau Daigle.
The lawsuit also includes a separate claim against Sullivan and Daigle for pointing guns at the people inside the car during the stop.
It also includes a third claim against Sullivan, saying that the officer hit Woods in the face with his handcuffs. Thursday, the officers could not be reached right away for comment.
After the video went viral on social media, people all over the country were outraged by what happened.
First Coast News reports that Woods’ family and a Jacksonville social justice group came together weeks after the incident to condemn the officers’ actions and call for an end to police brutality.
When the U.S. Department of Justice was briefly told about the arrest, it said it was “monitoring” the case.
The department stopped its review in November 2023, though, saying that the “incident does not give rise to a prosecutable violation of the federal civil rights laws.”
What happened to Le’Keian Woods?
A bystander took a video of Woods being arrested by police after the traffic stop.
At least three police officers were seen holding Woods down against grass next to a car. Daniels said that Woods was hit by police after being pulled over for allegedly not wearing a seat belt.
According to the arrest report and body camera footage, police said they saw Woods buying drugs at a gas station and thought he was armed.
They tried to stop the car, but instead followed Woods and his two friends, who were in a pickup truck, to a driveway that led nowhere in an apartment complex.
It was said in the report that Daigle and Sullivan tried to do a “high-risk takedown” there. The report said Woods ran through the apartment complex from the front passenger seat while Daigle was giving orders to the people inside.
The report said that Sullivan then chased Woods and used his taser on him. It was Sullivan, Garriga, and McCullough who hit and kneed Woods over and over again while they were trying to handcuff him.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said a few days after Woods’ arrest that they thought the officers “acted appropriately” in response to the situation. At first, Woods was charged with felonies, such as selling cocaine and amphetamines with a gun.
Later, though, those charges were dropped because Woods’ lawyer said he was just a passenger in the truck and could not have anything to do with the drugs. He admitted to fighting police without violence and was given a nine-day jail sentence.