A South Whitley police officer was fired after video surfaced of him violently detaining an 18-year-old woman during a January traffic stop for speeding.
According to video footage released by her father on YouTube, the officer yanked Vivian Augustus out of the car after having reached across her inside the car to unbuckle her seat belt.
He then threw her onto the wet parking lot, her drivers license visible in the video on the ground just above her head.
After he read the woman her Miranda warning, he berated her in the back seat of his cruiser where she sat handcuffed. He told her she had been going 37 mph in a 30 mph zone and had a headlight out.
It was daylight.
The officer, identified as Brian Schimmel in media reports, has been let go by the town. In the weeks since the arrest, town council members urged patience while the case moved forward, saying Schimmel’s actions were flawed but not worthy of dismissal.
The officer's termination came the same day that Whitley County Prosecutor D. J. Sigler announced his office was dismissing a charge of refusal to provide information or a driver’s license, a class C misdemeanor.
In his release announcing the decision to dismiss the charge, Sigler says that “legitimate concerns about the arrest and the officer’s behavior before, during, and after the traffic stop diminished the state’s ability to successfully prosecute the case to conviction.”
