A disabled man’s drive to the corner store with his legally blind nephew quickly turned into a nightmare case of police brutality, according to a recent civil rights complaint filed in the Southern District of Texas.
Terrence Holland, 47, filed a lawsuit last Wednesday against six Houston Police Department officers: Antonio Jose Otero, Aaron Parr, Lucia Gracia, R. Hernandez, Julian M. Montemayor and John C. Fisher. The filing accused them of wrongdoings such as falsifying charges, beating, dragging and tasering him multiple times over the course of a minute while unarmed and crying out in pain.
Otero, Parr, and Gracia are alleged to have participated in excessive use of force, while all six, including Hernandez, Montemayor and Fisher, were accused of covering up the violence by falsifying their reports of the incident.
City Attorney Arturo Michel told the Landing that his department had not yet been requested to represent the officers, but that once they received the petition they would review the case and decide whether to accept representation.
Otero was reached by phone but declined to comment on the suit. The other officers did not immediately respond to attempts to contact them directly.
Holland, who has multiple cognitive, psychological, and physical impairments, according to the suit, alleged he was the victim of a “pile-on” by multiple police officers in late December of 2019 which left him with “serious physical and emotional harm” after he was pulled over a block from his Houston home.
He declared in the suit that he hoped to bring attention to “the epidemic of police violence against Black and disabled people in particular,” according to the complaint filed on Wednesday. Holland, who is Black, relies on home health care aid for basic tasks, cannot stand for “long periods” and has trouble swallowing food, according to court documents.
“This can happen to anybody else,” Holland told the Landing in a statement through his lawyer, Shirley LaVarco. “I lived to say this. I could have died that day with them attacking me like that.”
The charge against Holland was dismissed at court after nearly two years of multiple court reschedulings during the coronavirus pandemic.
A spokesperson at HPD declined to comment on the lawsuit, directing questions to the city legal office.
An errand gone wrong
According to the filing, Holland was pulled over by HPD officer Otero around 11 p.m. on Dec. 19, 2019, after he had left his home to drive his blind nephew to the corner store. Worried for his safety, he called his then-girlfriend, who came outside to film the incident.
Otero initially “indicated” to Holland that he had been stopped for an issue with his license or registration, said the filing, and told him he was under arrest. Holland told the officer he was unarmed and the officer patted him down, according to the complaint.
But when Holland asked for a supervisor, the lawsuit alleges that Otero grew angry, and eventually radioed in for additional units. When they arrived, backup police officers Lucia Gracia and Aaron Parr found Holland “standing calmly with his hands in the air, to demonstrate that he posed no threat,” repeating his request for a supervisor.
“Otero did not take cover or do anything else that would suggest he feared for his safety or the safety of others,” states the lawsuit.
That’s when the lawsuit alleges Gracia and Parr began to kick and punch him and pull him to the ground without warning, and Parr deployed his taser directly to Holland for the first time without prior warning in “drive-stun” mode — where a taser is deployed in direct contact with a person rather than shooting probes from a distance.
“This was a violation of HPD policy, which prohibits the use of a taser on a person who is not resisting or who is exhibiting, at most, only passive resistance, as was true of Mr. Holland,” the lawsuit states.
According to the filing, Otero joined in as the defendants “repeatedly hit, kicked, and punched Mr. Holland, using their hands, fists, elbows, and knees to strike” him, before dragging him across a neighbor’s lawn, and tasing him again.
HPD policy states that “an officer’s decision to use force requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officer or others, and whether the suspect is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”
Holland’s girlfriend sobbed, reads the lawsuit, as the officers continued to tase Holland, who was “writhing” and “continued to cry out in pain.”
“You’re trying to kill him!” shouted Lisa Reyes, according to the lawsuit, as officers used the electric device on Holland “on and off, for about a minute after the first shock.”
According to the complaint, Reyes yelled Holland was disabled and begged officers to stop.
Two more HPD officers, Julian Montemayor and R. Hernandez, arrived at the scene but they also failed to intervene, alleged the lawsuit. Rather, Hernandez detained Reyes after asking her to stop recording. Montemayor also detained Holland’s nephew in a police cruiser.
When Holland was finally arrested and charged, it was not for license or registration issues but rather for assault on a police officer. The lawsuit alleges that “Otero admitted that he scraped his own elbow on Mr. Holland’s teeth when he repeatedly and intentionally struck his elbow against Mr. Holland’s head and face.”
The whole story
Douglas Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, told the Houston Landing that he’s “looking forward to seeing the real story.”
“Anytime a taser is used, it goes through several layers of review,” wrote Griffith over a text message. “Most departments delete body camera videos after five years. But we do not.”
But to Holland’s legal team, the accusations of the lawsuit are part of a pattern at HPD.
“Mr. Holland’s experience is not an anomaly,” said LaVarco in a written statement. “The Houston Police Department frequently escalates low-level traffic stops into traumatic and life-altering experiences for Black and Brown drivers. We want justice for Mr. Holland and an end to discriminatory traffic stops.”
A study of HPD data in 2022 found that Black drivers accounted for nearly 42% of stops despite Black Houstonians accounting for about 23% of the city’s population. According to the report by Texas Civil Rights Project, Black Houstonians are 29 times more likely to be subject to force during a traffic stop than white drivers.
Griffith pointed out that no complaint had been made to HPD after the incident, which happened five years ago.
When a person believes they have been a victim of misconduct by an HPD officer, they can complain directly to the department. Instead, Holland contacted his eventual lawyers through an alternative hotline for those who may not feel comfortable going directly to the police.
“Mr. Holland was deeply traumatized and is multiply disabled so it took him some time to get in touch with folks who were able to represent him and able to overcome over procedural hurdles,” LaVarco told the Landing.
Holland sued the Houston Police Department pro-se in 2022, a case dismissed because he sued the wrong entity and because of a two-year statute of limitations period. LaVarco argues that Holland is entitled to an extension in his federal suit due to the fact that he is disabled, she told the Landing.
Holland claimed that the incident resulted in hypervigilance and social avoidance so as not to trigger post-traumatic stress symptoms of an incident that caused “intense emotional distress and psychological trauma.”
There were also physical injuries, the lawsuit states: “ruptured stitches in Mr. Holland’s ear”; “split his lip”; a “severely bruised and wounded” rib cage.
Holland hopes his story will help others.
“I want everybody to keep going,” he said.
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