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Chaos on an Orange Line train ends with injured officer and a pepper-sprayed suspect under arrest
By adamg on Tue, 07/26/2011 - 1:36pm
A homeless man was arrested in the pedestrian tunnel between the Orange and Blue lines at State Street last night after a chase that began on an Orange Line train, MBTA Transit Police report.
According to a police report, Francisco Hernandez Diaz, of no particular address, took off his black leather belt on an inbound Orange Line train at State Street and began swinging it over his head and screaming, around 8:30 p.m., Monday.
As passengers swarmed out of the train to get away from him, a T inspector boarded the car. Hernandez took a swing at her with his belt, then stopped and undid his pants to expose himself to her. At that point, she fled as well, just as a police officer arrived on the platform, the report continues.
The officer ordered Diaz out of the train and demanded he lie on the ground. Hernandez got out of the train, but instead of getting down, he started running toward the Blue Line - with the officer in pursuit. But then the officer slipped on a set of "shiny floor tiles" and fell to the ground, with intense pain in the back of his right leg above the knee and no longer able to walk, the report says:
Once he hit the ground, Hernandez noted that he was injured and immediately turned around and began to approach him. The suspect began swinging the belt at [the officer] as he got closer in an attempt to hit him while he was on the ground. It was at this point that [the officer] delivered an approximately one second burst from his department issued oleoresin capscicum cannister in the suspect's eyes. Hernandez immediately turned, placed his hands to his face and once again fled down the corridor between the Orange Line and the Blue Line.
Another officer, who had been stationed at the Blue Line end of the tunnel, put Diaz under arrest after a brief struggle. He was charged with open and gross lewdness and assault and battery on a police officer.
His bail was set at $1,000 at his arraignment today in Suffolk Superior Court, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
oh great
Great, now the MBTA is going to spend a few million dollars replacing the shiny floor tiles with cop-friendly gravel. For everyone's safety, of course.
shiny floor tiles
it's a T station, so probably not shiny from a fresh mopping
I wonder if this happened on
I wonder if this happened on the old horse cars in the 19th Century.
Given high alcohol consumption pre-prohibition ...
... not to mention legal opium, it is a very good bet that these sorts of things occurred with fair regularity. They just didn't get much reported in the papers after the police beat down that would ensue.
Ah yes...
Police beat downs, legal opium and abundant horse manure....those were the days my friends...
Look in the old newspapers
If you read the newspapers of the horsecar era (and the early electric era), you'll find lots of stories like this, except, of course, for the pepper spray. Lots of these stories in the small-town weekly papers (just like they print the crime reports today), fewer in the big-city dailies. But they're there.
Subway Justice
I hope the cops gave him justice because there is no justice in the Halls of Justice
Take a civics class
Justice is explicitly not part of a cop's job, for very good reason.