White cop won't face charges for violent use of force against black teenagers at Texas pool party

Eric Casebolt, a white former police officer from McKinney, TX who became instantly notorious after being caught on camera violently roughing up a group of black teenagers at a pool party last summer, will not be indicted for his actions, a grand jury decided on Thursday.

With that decision, Casebolt joins a long, long line of police officers who either avoid grand jury indictments for misconduct or avoid even being brought before a jury at all.

At the time of the incident, Casebolt’s attorney John Mills explained his behavior by saying that he had recently responded to two other instances of breaking and entering at the same pool. Following the grand jury decision, Mills expressed relief.

“We’re glad that the system worked in his favor in this case,” he told The Dallas Morning News.

Casebolt was one of twelve officers (all of them white) who were called to the Craig Ranch gated community on June 5th, 2015 after receiving calls from residents that a group of black teenagers who were not from the neighborhood were using a pool there.

“The initial call came in as a disturbance involving multiple juveniles at the location, who do not live in the area or have permission to be there, refusing to leave,” the police department said in a now-deleted Facebook post. “McKinney Police received several additional calls related to this incident advising that juveniles were now actively fighting.”

The fight, some of the partygoers told Buzzfeed, broke out after a group of adults from the neighborhood approached them and began to make racist comments to them like telling them that they should return to “Section 8 [public] housing.”

While some of the officers merely handcuffed some of the kids while breaking the altercation up, Casebolt took it upon himself to violently throw then 15-year-old Dajerria Becton to the ground while pulling on her hair and then brandishing his gun at two other children.

“He grabbed me, twisted my arm on my back and shoved me in the grass and started pulling the back of my braids,” Becton told Fox 4 News. “I was telling him to get off me because my back was hurting bad.”

Four days after the video of Casebolt’s behavior surfaced on the internet, the police department put him on temporary leave before he was eventually dismissed. Now, a grand jury has cleared him.