
They said he won’t know for sure until he tries. Though the surgery was successful, doctors told him the trauma could make it impossible for him to have children. But two days later, he visited the hospital and learned he needed emergency surgery to repair a ruptured testicle. He looked up and saw the officer discard the spent metal cylinder on the ground in front of him, he said.Īt first, he didn’t realize the magnitude of the injury and tried to sleep it off. “And after he fired the riot gun, I realized he wasn’t aiming for my chest, and it hit me directly in the groin,” he said. That’s when the officer, who was standing no more than 10 feet away, opened fire, Sanderlin said. And I was just really hoping he wasn’t going to shoot me.” “And I sort of shook my head no and held onto my sign across my chest. “But a police officer behind them also with a riot gun pointed it directly at me and said ‘move,’” Sanderlin said. Some of the officers began to back off, he said. “They told me to move and I said, ‘I can’t do that, please don’t do this,’” he said. Video footage shows him standing in front of the officers, his arms above his head. Sanderlin walked sideways toward the line of police, his hands raised, and asked them to stop. “I couldn’t stand by and watch anymore,” he said. Officers were shooting the woman from a distance of about eight to 10 feet away, Sanderlin said. “I just turned around for a second and saw a really young woman, probably in her teens, being shot directly in the chest,” by rubber bullets, Sanderlin said. They were on 5th Street, in front of a church. Still, the vast majority of the protesters remained peaceful, he said.īy then, police had pushed the crowd back to City Hall. He said that as the police use of force intensified, five or six people in the back of the crowd of protesters began throwing bottles and trash at officers. Some of them were children, old women, folks who were not in any way acting violently against them.” “They started shooting people point blank with riot guns. “On the way back, it just started to escalate as far as the cops intervening,” Sanderlin said. Recent protests in Los Angeles have served up a steady stream of troubling videos of police aggression and violence.īut as the protesters left the freeway to make their way to City Hall, something shifted in the police response to the demonstration, he said. police violence, aggression amid demonstrations Sanderlin was able to diffuse the incident.Ĭalifornia Troubling videos capture L.A. I just said, ‘get out of here, man!’ He seemed really upset and I didn’t want things to escalate further or anyone else to get hurt, so I just tried to encourage him to just move along.”

“As soon as I heard the glass break, I turned around and was like woah, woah, woah,” Sanderlin said. Video of the protest that aired on ABC7 shows him shooing people away from the vehicle and leaning into the window to speak with the driver.


Sanderlin stepped between the car and the crowd to mediate.

Demonstrators exchanged words with the driver, and someone smashed the car’s back windshield.
Movealong protest license#
Their aim was to hold the vehicles on the freeway for about 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee was pressed into Floyd’s neck, Sanderlin said.Īt one point, a group of people surrounded a Ford Mustang that had a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ license plate holder. The protesters spilled onto the 101 Freeway, blocking traffic.
