Video has finally been released of a vicious incident involving a school security officer in Louisville, KY, who choked out a student half his size and dropped him to the ground, resulting in brain damage.
Officer Jonathan Hardin is facing charges of assault, wanton endangerment, official misconduct and false swearing after it emerged that on multiple separate occasions he used extreme excessive physical force on students at Olmstead Academy North Middle School.
The surveillance footage, released following a probable cause hearing on Thursday shows the excited student running into Hardin, in what has been described as an attempt to ‘chest bump’ the officer. Hardin was off balance, however, and fell to the ground, causing him to become angry and charge at the student.
The video shows Hardin lifting the13-year-old child into the air with a chokehold. The child kicks and flails around before becoming limp and lifeless. Hardin then drops the student to the ground, resulting in what a doctor has described as “an injury to the brain” due to loss of blood flow.
Sargeant Rivera of the LMPD noted in court that the video is consistent with strangulation.
The video shows that the boy laid unconscious on the ground for a short time. Instead of calling for medical help, Hardin opted to handcuff the child and isolate him for the entire day.
Eventually, Hardin drove the boy home, without informing the parents about the incident. The doctor, Bill Smock, reported that the boy was lucky to be alive, noting that Hardin’s conduct “manifested an extreme indifference to the value of human life, caused serious physical injury to the child and wantonly created a grave risk of death to the victim.”
Surveillance footage also exists, from five days prior to this incident, of Hardin punching another 13-year-old full in the face because he had reason to believe that the student had cut in line at the cafeteria.
The court documents note that following the assault, which resulted in lacerations to the inside of the mouth and swelling to the child’s face, Hardin charged the student with menacing and resisting arrest. Police have confirmed that there was no probable cause for Hardin’s actions in this instance.
This is also not the first time that Hardin has been linked with such abuse. Last year, a lawsuit was brought by a police academy student who claimed that the officer physically abused him while he worked there.
The then 14-year-old child claimed that Hardin pulled him out of bed by the neck at 3 in the morning, and forced him to do pushups for an hour without water. The case only came to light when the teenager confided in a mental health director at The University of Louisville, who was then dismissed from the university’s clinical psychology department when she reported the incident to higher ups.
Hardin remains out of jail on bond and has been suspended from the school without pay.
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Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.
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