The mother of an African American boy filed a $300,000 lawsuit Thursday, saying an Oregon police deputy knelt on the boy’s neck during an arrest while two others pinned him to the ground.
Attorneys for Ka’Mar Benbo said deputies with the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office responded to calls in August 2019 reporting teenage girls fighting in front of a suburban mall near Portland.
As Benbo, then 12, was leaving the mall with friends, he was allegedly grabbed and pinned onto the ground by several deputies.
The alleged brutality happened nearly a year before widespread national outrage over the killing of George Floyd, 46, after he was put in a similar hold by Minneapolis police.
Derek Chauvin, a white officer with the Minneapolis Police Department, knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as he pleaded ‘I can’t breathe!’ He later died.
A number of protests have since sparked across the United States to fight police brutality and systematic racism.
Benbo, who is now 13, and his family formally brought the lawsuit against five of the deputies involved in the matter.
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