The mother of a Firestone Community Learning Center student who was punched in the head multiple times by an Akron police officer at school last week said she thought someone should have intervened to protect her teenage son before he was struck by police.
“The fact that no one stood up for my son baffles me,” LaToya Smith-Robinson, the mother of the 16-year-old, told Signal Akron Monday.
Signal Akron is not identifying Smith-Robinson’s son because he is a minor.
Smith-Robinson said her son was entering Firestone CLC last Wednesday morning when he walked around the metal detectors in an attempt to keep his phone on him. Students are not allowed to have their phones in class; they must stow them in Yondr pouches, which restrict access to them.
The student told Signal Akron he wanted to hold on to his phone so he could listen to music.
Going through the metal detectors
Smith-Robinson said Principal Tina Loughry saw her son avoid the school metal detector and told him to turn around and go through it. He did.
But the metal detector went off. The student was told to go back through the metal detector a second time, then a third.
By then, he said, “I was extremely frustrated and irritated.” He refused to go through the metal detector a fourth time, his mother said.
“He should have been wanded, but he wasn’t,” Smith-Robinson said, noting that other students were checked with hand-held metal detectors after they went through the larger, walk-through detectors.
Instead, the situation escalated. According to video of the incident released Monday by Akron Public Schools, a scuffle began between the student and two Akron police officers — one a school resource officer based at Firestone, Zachary McCormick; the other an Akron police officer named Daniel Henry who was working at the school via an outside contract.
The student tried to push through the officers. The officers grabbed both of his arms, the video showed. Henry fell as he tried to bring the student to the ground.
“They immediately jump to ‘Tall, Black, dark-skinned man — he’s a threat,’” Smith-Robinson said of her 6-foot-2-inch-tall son. “He was racially profiled.”
The two officers involved in the incident are white.
The student, who was pushed to his knees by the officers, stood again with the officers still at his sides. After the teen stood, McCormick punched the student repeatedly in the back of the head, bringing him to the ground.
McCormick appeared to continue to punch the teenager once he was on the ground.
The student said to his recollection, he was punched four times: twice in the nose, once in the back of his head and once in the side of his face.
“Why is all this happening over something not serious?” he said he recalled thinking. “You could really just pat me down.”
The student was handcuffed as he lay face-down on the ground. He was then turned on his side, at which point officers did pat him down.
‘He gets in trouble for stupid nonsense’
Later on the morning of the incident, Smith-Robinson said she received a phone call from the school informing her that her son had been arrested. When she arrived at Firestone CLC, she saw her son and thought he had gotten into a fight — his nose had been bleeding, she said, and he was in handcuffs.
At Firestone CLC, Smith-Robinson was escorted to a conference room where her son sat with two officers, she said. That’s when she learned that he had been punched by an officer after trying to bring his phone into the school.
“I was very, very upset,” she said. “I was hurt.”
The teenager was taken to the Summit County Juvenile Detention Center last week on charges of criminal trespass, obstructing official business and resisting arrest. Mayor Shammas Malik said during a Monday press conference that the charges had been dismissed without prejudice (which means they could be refiled at a later date) while an investigation into the officers is ongoing.
The student said he was never told that he was being arrested. If he had been, his mother said, he would have reacted calmly. She knows that because he was detained at a local Walmart earlier this year, she said, and he was compliant — just as she had taught him.
“He knows not to resist no cops,” she said.
Smith-Robinson said it was clear to her the officers didn’t know how to handle “a teenage, hormonal boy.” She characterized his response as fight-or-flight after he was initially confronted by officers.
“My kid, he has no violent record. He gets in trouble for stupid nonsense,” she said. “I would feel threatened, too, if someone was grabbing me.”
His mother said he was kicked out of Firestone last year after he excitedly tried to hug a teacher to celebrate catching a football; he was allowed to return this year.
“He’s just a goofy kid,” she said.
The teenager’s 10-day suspension came because he walked around the metal detector, a violation of his behavioral contract, an agreement between him and the school about how he would conduct himself.
Smith-Robinson said as she watched the video at the Akron Board of Education on Friday of her son’s encounter with the principal, the head of security for the school district and her son last week, she thought, “Not my baby.”
“I was aggravated watching it,” she said. “I was just flabbergasted.”
‘These are somebody’s children’
While her son is physically OK, Smith-Robinson said the ordeal has taken a toll on her and on her family. She said she still doesn’t know how to feel.
“I need these people to understand — this is not grownups, adults on the street,” she said. “These are somebody’s children, these are somebody’s kids.”
Smith-Robinson chalked the officers’ behavior up to “men’s egos” and the officers’ struggle to restrain her son. “I just can’t believe they handled the situation like that,” she said. “They’re two grown men. None of this was necessary.”
