A black woman shown in viral cell phone footage cradling her 1-year-old son just before New York officers ripped the child from the woman's arms is set to take home $625,000 in a lawsuit settlement, according to NBC News. Jazmine Headley filed a suit in federal court after the troubling encounter played out at a social services office Dec. 7, 2018, in Brooklyn, the network reported.
Headley had went to the office to look into receiving child care benefits when she ended up sitting on the floor of a busy waiting room with her child, fending off officers who had ordered her to leave for asking to see a supervisor, according to the lawsuit NBC News obtained. What happened when the encounter escalated played out on video viewed by millions of social media users.
Three officers were shown on the video surrounding Headley as they each worked to separate her from her child. They grabbed and yanked at the baby. “They’re hurting my son,” Headley shouted. She repeated the words at least seven times, but the tug-of-war only intensified, with one officer shown on the video yanking so fiercely the cop’s upper body bounced up and down. “Oh my God! Look what they’re doing to her,” a bystander yelled. The video played for just short of two minutes.
The New York Times reported that Headley ended up charged with acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration, trespassing, and—what seems to be a favorite among cops looking to justify excessive force—resisting arrest. The charges were later dropped and Headley was released from Rikers Island, where she was sent as a result of the incident, the newspaper reported. She ended up participating in a pretrial intervention program requiring her to do 20 hours of community service for an unrelated charge pertaining to credit card fraud in New Jersey, The New York Times reported.
Two human resources peace officers were put on modified duty in the incident, and Mayor Bill de Blasio apologized to Headley publicly at an unrelated event last December, according to The Washington Post. “We will get to the bottom of exactly what happened and we will put in place specific changes to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” de Blasio said, calling the encounter “deeply troubling” and “100 percent unacceptable.”
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez also released a statement last December saying he was "horrified by the violence depicted in the video." "An HRA officer escalated the situation as Ms. Headley was about to leave the premises, creating an awful scenario of a baby being torn from his mother," Gonzalez said in the statement. "The consequences this young and desperate mother has already suffered as a result of this arrest far outweigh any conduct that may have led to it: she and her baby have been traumatized."
Just after her release last year, Headley thanked the public for an outpouring of support. "I'm just so grateful to everyone," she said. "And I'm just happy to be free, and I just need to see my boy.”