Ben
Fields, the Richland County sheriff’s senior deputy who was caught on
video during the incident at Spring Valley High School, joined the
sheriff's department in 2004 and became a school resource officer in
2008, assigned to two schools in Richland School District Two.
A
year prior, Carlos and Tashiana Martin had filed a suit against Fields,
another deputy and the county’s sheriff over an October 2005 incident.
According to the suit,
Carlos Martin claimed Fields questioned him in an apartment parking lot
as to whether he was the “cause of excessive noise complained of by a
resident” in Martin’s neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. Martin
said he was not, as he had been driving home from work. In their
interaction, Martin referred to Fields as “dude,” agitating the officer,
the lawsuit states.
According to Tuesday's KPLC 7 News, a Sulphur, La., police officer
fatally shot a 14-month-old dog on Monday morning after being called
out to investigate a call about two suspicious men who were trespassing.
Though
the police officer has stated that the dog bit him, a witness to the
traumatic scene has a different version of what took place at the
parking lot of the Southwest Daily News. The young dog, named "Arzy
Kensington," had been tied to a fence near a box truck which Brandon
Carpenter, 28, and Logan Laliberte, 21, had taken shelter in when it
started to rain.
According to Eric Midkiff, circulation manager at
the Southwest Daily News, the officer who had been called out to the
scene to investigate a possible trespassing, interacted briefly with the
dog before firing the fatal shot. Midkiff described what he saw to the Huffington Post:
The dog was rubbing up against the cop,
He would rub the dog's back and then push him away. All of a sudden, he just jumped down and shot the dog in the head."
He added:
That dog did not bite that officer,"
"The dog was wagging his tail, his tongue was hanging out."