A police officer is seen body slamming a 12-year-old girl at a San Antonio middle school in a video posted online last week, and now the school district is investigating.
The incident appears similar to one that occurred in South Carolina last year, when a
deputy flipped a girl out of her desk in a classroom, and it is dredging up similar controversy.
San Antonio Independent School District spokeswoman
Leslie Price told the San Antonio Express-News that Officer Joshua Kehm has been placed on paid administrative leave as the district investigates the incident that happened at Rhodes Middle School on March 29.
Cell phone video shows Kehm attempting to restrain the 12-year-old girl, identified as Janissa Valdez, before body slamming her to the ground. Kehm then handcuffs Valdez and leads her away.
The video has since gone viral with more than 250,000 views on YouTube since it was posted Tuesday.
"This video is very concerning, and we are working to get all of the details," Price told the Express-News. "We certainly want to understand what all occurred, and we are not going to tolerate excessive force in our district."
"I just want something done," Gloria Valdez, Janissa's mother, told the Express-News. "Because he could go back and do it again to my daughter or another student."
Some students at the school told KSAT-TV that Kehm was attempting to break up a confrontation between Valdez and another student, and things then escalated. The students told the TV station that Valdez kicked the officer several times before the body slam, but the girl has denied that.
"I was walking toward [the other student], telling her, 'Let's go somewhere else,' because there was a lot of people," Valdez told KSAT-TV. "Then that's when other people came over and the officer thought we were going to fight, so that's whenever he came and did that."
Last October in South Carolina, a school resource officer was fired after flipping a high school girl in her desk and
dragging her across the floor, according to NBC News. In that incident, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott ruled that senior deputy Ben Fields' actions were "not acceptable" in trying to get girl from leave the classroom.
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