Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said a criminal investigation into Thomas Woodworth, the prison officer who intentionally drove his truck into a group of Jewish activists, is ongoing and “should be finished in the coming weeks.”
Investigators are “focused on the operation of the truck and the deployment of pepper spray by other prison personnel, Neronha said. He wouldn't say how many people are under investigation or what charges they could face.” Accounts from nearly three dozen witnesses have been reviewed, The New York Times reports, with “at least 20 more to go.”
Woodworth resigned from his post last week but has remained free since being seen, on video, intentionally driving his vehicle into peaceful Never Again Action demonstrators who were protesting outside the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island. In video from the group and WJAR, guards are also seen pepper-spraying activists, of which three had to be treated.
Never Again Action’s protest is among the most recent of the group’s peaceful demonstrations in opposition of mass deportation policies. As many as 140 immigrant detainees are currently being jailed at Wyatt, as part of a new agreement with the federal government: “The Boston office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement started holding detainees at Wyatt again in March, a decade after a man's death there ended the practice.”
But a growing number of Americans, from Florida to Virginia to D.C., are vocally opposing mass detention in their communities. “Activists held a press conference at the Rhode Island State House on Tuesday to call for the detention facility, a quasi-public institution, to be shut down,” The Times continued. “Central Falls Mayor James Diossa also said recently that it should be shut down.”
Meanwhile, the executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police expressed sympathy for this officer caught on video trying to mow people down, saying he “wanted to remind all interested parties that police officers are entitled to the same presumption of innocence and same due process rights as any other citizen,” The Times continued.