Coastal
Post Online
January,
2004
The Future Of Peaceful Protest?
Model Student Recounts Horrors Of Arrest
By Jim Defede
Miami Herald, June
21
Laurel Ripple, 21, is
everything we say we want our young people to be -- smart, driven, socially
conscious.
When she was a
senior at MAST Academy, Laurel delivered 3,000 postcards to Miami-Dade Mayor
Alex Penelas, signed by high school students opposed to his plan to build an
airport on the edge of the Everglades.
A member of the Sierra Club since she was a teenager, Ripple spent the
last six months encouraging college students like herself to come to Miami and
oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
On Nov. 21, Laurel was part of a vigil outside the county jail
for the protesters arrested the day before. After three hours, the Miami-Dade
police ordered everyone to leave. As anyone who watched the scene unfold live
on television can attest, the police moved forward into the crowd of 100
people, cutting off about 40 protesters and trapping them against a chain link
fence.
''The front line of the
police all had shields, and they kept pushing in, pinning us against the
fence,'' recalls Laurel, who grew up in South Miami. After a few minutes,
Laurel said she fell to the ground and covered her head, whereupon an officer
grabbed her wrists with one hand, lifted her arms and began blasting her with
pepper spray.
''I started
screaming in pain,'' Laurel says. He
had held the canister so close to my face that my hair and face were dripping
with pepper spray.''
In the
melee, she said she badly twisted her ankle. She was taken to a makeshift jail
in Earlington Heights for processing and decontamination.
''Because I couldn't walk, they dragged
me,'' she recalls. They had a shower
set up in the parking lot. Two officers held me up as I was drenched for a few
seconds with water. I was then dragged into this tent. It was dark. There were
four men in white biohazard suits. I'm
still coughing and crying from the pepper spray. I can't really tell what is
happening.''
With her hands still
bound behind her back, she said she felt her T-shirt coming apart. ''That's
when I realized they had scissors and they were cutting my clothes off of me,''
she says.
She said she begged
them to stop, saying she could take her own clothes off. And she asked why
there wasn't a female officer present. ''They didn't say anything to me,'' she
says, her hands shaking as she lights a cigarette. No one ever said a word to
me while they were doing this.
"After they cut my shirt off, they cut off my jeans and my
underwear. I'm standing there totally naked. I felt completely violated. It was
humiliating.''
Wearing a set of
surgical scrubs, she was booked into jail barefoot, and claims she never
received medical attention for her ankle.
Her criminal charge: unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor.
Sgt. Pete Andreu, a spokesman for the
Miami-Dade Police Department, said he could neither confirm nor deny Laurel was
pepper-sprayed by police. The ''chemical agent'' could have been released by
one of the protesters, he said. He also doubted she ever asked for medical
help. The decontamination, he added, was done by the Miami-Dade Fire
Department.
The fire department
said Laurel received standard treatment for ''gross decontamination.'' ''If we
had permitted her to remove her own clothes, she could have recontaminated
herself,'' said fire department spokesman Lt. Eugene Germain Jr.
I wonder how Penelas or Miami Mayor Manny
Diaz would feel if their wives or their children were put through such a
process.
Jonathan Ullman, South
Florida field representative for the Sierra Club, saw Laurel being arrested on
television.
''She's a great
kid,'' he says. I couldn't believe
it.''
Ullman called the
Washington office of the Sierra Club, which dispatched attorneys to get Laurel
out of jail within a few hours. The Sierra Club's executive director wrote
President Bush this month demanding a Justice Department investigation into
Laurel's arrest and the allegations of police misconduct made by other Sierra Club
members.
So far, there has been
no response. Laurel's next court date is Dec. 30.