NEW YORK, Jan. 30 (UPI) — A New York woman said she will sue the New York Police Department for $250 million for allegedly mishandling her 7-year-old son’s arrest for a robbery beating.
The mother said her son, who allegedly beat up and stole $5 from another boy, 9, near the grounds of Public School 114 and was handcuffed and detained for hours after the December incident, was treated like a hardened criminal, the New York Daily News reported Wednesday.
The boy was arrested in his third-grade classroom, held at the school for four hours and in custody at the police precinct for six hours, verbally abused, interrogated, and humiliated by police calling him a thief and saying they would put him away “with the big boys,” Jack Yankowitz, the mother’s lawyer, said.
“If (this) 7-year-old and his mother lived on 64th and Park and he attended a $35,000-a-year private school, do you think (he) would have been arrested, handcuffed to a wall and denied access to his mother and legal counsel for 10 hours?” Yankowitz said.
The child was held for four hours and 40 minutes, an NYPD spokeswoman said.
Police said the boy was treated well, given pizza and allowed to see his mother.
“He had to be handcuffed — he was a prisoner. If we didn’t handcuff him and he ran out the front door, then we would have had an escaped prisoner on our hands,” adding that the boy was “no angel.”
Charges were pressed, but the boy has not yet appeared in Family Court.
Copyright 2013 United Press International, Inc. (UPI).
