PITTSBURGH — The
mother of a young black man who claims three Pittsburgh police officers
wrongfully beat and arrested him says the injuries inflicted made her son
unrecognizable when she picked him up at the county jail the next night.
Terez Miles testified
Wednesday in her son Jordan's federal civil rights trial against the officers
that she became "hysterical" when the unrecognizable figure of her
son walked toward her and said, "Mom, I need to go to the hospital."
Miles was 18 when he
was arrested and beaten in January 2010.
Police contend Miles
was acting suspiciously and appeared to be armed; but his attorneys contend
that's a cover story cooked up by three white officers who stopped Miles simply
because he was a young black man in a high-crime area.
The grandmother of a
black man who claims he was wrongfully arrested and beaten by three white
Pittsburgh police officers testified Wednesday that he's had recurring
nightmares and found it hard to stay in school since the attack.
But defense attorneys
attempted to use Patricia Porter's testimony to undermine claims that her now
20-year-old grandson's academic progress was hampered by the Jan. 12, 2010,
incident, when he was an 18-year-old senior at the city's performing arts high
school.
Porter testified in
U.S. District Court that Jordan Miles was so unnerved by the incident that he
withdrew from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford when police were called
to a disturbance in his dormitory months later.
The disturbance
didn't involve Miles, but seeing the police respond nearby "upset him so
badly, he wasn't even able to stay on the campus," Porter testified. She
also said he has difficulty concentrating and studying since the incident.
The three officers
accused of violating Miles' civil rights — Richard Ewing, Michael Saldutte and
David Sisak — have claimed they thought he was an armed prowler and that they
only used force to subdue him because he fought with them and ran away.
The officers have
also claimed they thought a soda bottle in his pocket was a gun — though Miles'
attorneys contend there was no soda bottle when he was arrested while walking
to his grandmother's house at about 11 p.m., and that the story is a thinly
veiled pretext to justify the officers' overreaction and brutality.
The officers have never
produced the bottle, claiming they threw it away. Miles' attorneys argued the
bottle's absence bolsters their claim that their client was rousted simply
because he was a young black man in a high-crime area.
Although his
grandmother's testimony isn't relevant to the civil rights claims that Miles
was wrongly arrested, prosecuted and beaten, his attorneys want a jury to award
damages because they claim his academic career and future was derailed by his
resulting memory problems and post-traumatic stress disorder.
To that end, his
grandmother's testimony cut both ways. In addition to detailing his academic
problems after the incident, the former public school teacher also said Miles'
demeanor "was like someone coming home from war, traumatized."
But James Wymard, one
of the officers' attorneys, introduced evidence that undercut Miles' academic
claims while cross-examining his grandmother.
Although Miles'
grades dipped in his final high school semester after the beating — from a 3.4
grade point average to 2.4 — Wymard noted that Miles had gotten C's and D's in
math classes in prior years, and scored poorly on a college entrance exam the
previous November.
Miles attorney J.
Kerrington Lewis has described his client as an "honors student" to
the jury, but Wymard noted that Miles graduated 85th out of 115 students in his
class.
His grandmother said
she wasn't aware of that but still maintained the incident has affected him.
"There was a
dramatic change in his personality after this happened," she testified.