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April 15, 2021, 6:06 am
A viral video showing a confrontation between a white army officer and a Black man in the suburbs of Columbia, South Carolina, has resulted in charges being brought against the former for third-degree assault.
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The two-and-a-half-minute video doesn’t show what started the altercation, but it does show U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Jonathan Pentland repeatedly telling a man identified only as Deandre to get out of the neighborhood.
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Deandre tells him that he’s just walking through the neighborhood and suggests Pentland and his wife call the police if they’re so concerned about him.
Off-camera, Pentland’s wife says they’ve already been called and shouts out some claim that Deandre was the “aggressor” in some previous incident. Deandre challenges her claim, taking three steps closer to her, at which point Pentland roughly shoves him, almost knocking him over.
“You walk away! You’re talking to my wife right now,” Pentland screams. “You either walk away or I’m gonna carry your ass out of here.”
“You better not touch me,” Deandre replies. “I didn’t do anything.”
“I’m about to do something to you,” Pentland fires back.
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Throughout the altercation, Deandre also tells Pentland several times that he lives in the area, something Pentland repeatedly claims is untrue.
“We are a tight-knit community,” he says. “We take care of each other.”
The police eventually arrived and both the woman who stopped to record the incident and another bystander who happened upon them at the end, Shirell Johnson, waited with Deandre to tell cops that he had been assaulted, alleging that Pentland knocked his phone out of his hand at one point when the camera wasn’t rolling, cracking the screen.
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Johnson said that at the time, the officer claimed “his supervisor told him that he could only charge the white guy with malicious injury to property and not assault.”
After the video went viral, Pentland was identified by name and as an army official, prompting protestors to swarm his house and Fort Jackson to open their own investigation.
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Police got involved again, ultimately arresting Pentland and charging him with third-degree assault.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said that Deandre has been involved in other incidents in the neighborhood but that “none of them justified the assault that occurred.” His office also said that Deandre has “an underlying medical condition that may explain the behavior exhibited in the alleged incidents.”
“The young man was a victim, the individual that was arrested was the aggressor, and he’s been dealt with accordingly,” Lott said.
*First Published: April 15, 2021, 6:06 am
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