An elderly Oklahoma City woman has filed a lawsuit against the city, and three of the city’s police officers for allegedly breaking her arm during an arrest last summer.
ABC’s KOCO News reports that 74-year-old Ruby Jones, who is Black, filed the lawsuit this week, asserting that the officers were both racist, and overly aggressive towards her. TMZ obtained body camera footage from the incident, where Jones can be seen answering the door after police arrived at her home to arrest her son, Chauncey. She asks what is going on, and is repeatedly told there’s a warrant out for his arrest after officers alleged a bomb threat had been received at the Red Rock Behavioral Center. The call was allegedly traced to her home, but she refused to let them in the house since they did not provide proof of a warrant.
“You’re fixin’ to go if you don’t move,” one of the officers can be heard telling Jones in the clip. The situation then escalates as the officers draw their weapons, with one of them shouting at Chauncey, “Let me see your f*cking hands.” Jones made sure to tell the officers that Chauncey did not have a gun, but they told her to leave the house. When she didn’t, because she was concerned for the safety of her son, she was yanked by two of the cops and placed in handcuffs.
At one point, she falls to the floor in pain as her arms are forced behind her back. When she’s taken outside, she tells the officer taking her to their car, “I just told you he don’t have a gun and I didn’t want you to shoot him. I see the news all the time, and that’s all they do.”
In a statement shared with KOCO 5, Jones said that she’ll “never forget this” and the pain the experience put her through. "When they pulled me in there, they pulled me up out of there, and my arm was broken. And they pulled it back," she added. The incident happened in August, 2020. "They just barged into her home with their guns drawn, cussing at her son who they knew had a mental health issue," her attorney Demarrio Solomon-Simmons said. "That would not have happened to a white grandmother, in a white neighborhood."
In a statement, the Oklahoma City Police Department admitted that there should have been “greater efforts to de-escalate” the situation.
