A video of a screaming, frantic teen being dragged into a squad car by officers stood out during the opening day of a trial against a St. Paul police officer accused of punching the handcuffed 14-year-old girl after she spat at him.
The footage was played inside a Ramsey County courtroom as officer Michael Soucheray watched from his seat next to his defense attorney. It showed the girl wailing and repeatedly yelling “no” as two officers force her into the car.
The officers were called to a St. Paul shelter for sexually exploited teens just after 8:30 p.m. Dec. 1 to take one of the residents to a hospital after she tried to harm herself, according to authorities.
The video shows her actively resisting the officers, who eventually handcuff her and force her inside the squad car.
The struggle continues in the vehicle as the officers appear to try to fasten her seat belt. Suddenly, one of the officer’s arms can be seen swinging toward the girl, who was out of the frame, before a male voice yells “You (expletive expletive).” The man is then overheard informing the teen that she is now going to jail for fourth-degree assault against an officer.
“He punched me,” she starts yelling over and over again.
“Why did you do that, why?” she is overheard saying at one point. “Answer me you, (expletive).”
She later apologizes to the officers and begs them not to take her to jail.
The teen at the center of the fifth-degree assault charge pending against Soucheray watched from the witness stand as the 10-minute clip captured on the officers’ squad camera played in court.
When it was over, Assistant Minneapolis City Attorney Christopher Bates asked her what it was like to watch it.
“It makes me mad to watch it, the video, and sad,” she said. “I just think that … Why? … Why did you have to be so aggressive and so mean?”
Before the video was played, the prosecution and defense made their opening statements in the case.
Bates said Soucheray got upset when the handcuffed girl spit in his face as he tried to get her into the back of his and his partner’s squad car that day. Angry, he retaliated, Bates said.
“Officer Soucheray struck her twice in the face, pushed her face away and called her ‘a (expletive expletive),’ ” Bates said.
The evidence the state will present, he continued, will show that his actions crossed the legal line.
Defense attorney Peter Wold offered jurors a different perspective of the chaotic events of that evening.
He described Soucheray and his partner as doing the work that even counselors at the shelter couldn’t do, which was to try to calm down a hysterical teen and get her the help she needed at a hospital.
In the midst of it, Wold said that the girl spat at the officer, causing his training to justifiably kick in. In that moment, Soucheray employed a tactic Wold called “startle, flinch and respond,” to defend himself and de-escalate the situation.
The maneuver, he explained, involves feigning a strike to someone’s face, causing them to flinch and back away.
That’s what Soucheray was doing, he continued, when he raised his hand toward the girl.
If he ended up making contact with her face, it was accidental and minimal, Wold said during a court recess.
He added that the girl suffered no injuries and suffered no marks on her face.
“Not a mark. Not a scratch,” he said during his opening statement.
He called her act of spitting a “dirty and dangerous crime” that can spread germs and “deadly disease.”
“(Officer Soucheray) reacted. … It was a trained reaction,” Wold said. “He is entitled to defend himself from an assault and that’s what he did.”
He went on to describe Soucheray as a “good cop” who landed his dream job with the St. Paul Police Department in 2009 after working as a corrections officer and jailer.
He also said his actions toward the teen that day helped de-escalate a tense situation
Both the prosecution and the defense questioned the girl during the opening day of the trial. A few times, the presiding judge had to call a brief recess after the teen asked to talk to her lawyer.
Once, she left the courtroom in tears.
The girl admitted on the stand that she was “mad” and “upset” when she was approached by Soucheray and his partner in the entry of the shelter.
She also acknowledged spitting at the officer, and said she shouldn’t have done.
While her memory of exactly what transpired in the car was fuzzy at times, she said, she was emphatic about what Soucheray did to her after she spat.
“He hit me,” she told Bates. “He grabbed my face and he hit me. … I don’t know how many times, but he hit me across the face.”
When it was Wold’s turn to question her, he asked the teen to recall how emotional, loud and combative she was that day.
“You were screaming and then you stopped screaming and brought a lot of saliva into your mouth and spit at him … as he was inches away from you, right” he asked her.
“Yes,” she responded.
He went on to ask her about comments she made to police days after the incident, suggesting that she had told them it wasn’t a big deal.
“You weren’t hit on the mouth, right? You weren’t hit on the nose, right? You were never struck four or five times in the front of the face. … If anything you may have been scraped on the side of your face, right,” Wold asked her.
“I wasn’t scraped; I was punched on the side of the face,” the girl responded.
Testimony will continue Wednesday.