Cop suspended on suspicion of assault following what family calls a teenage prank
Elsmere area residents say a teenage prank, called ding dong ditch, prompted Delaware State Police officers to carry out a manhunt Monday that swarmed a quiet residential street with a dozen police cruisers, a K9, and a helicopter overhead.
It ended with the families of two teenagers saying police assaulted their boys in separate incidents.
Tara Murphy said her 15-year-old nephew will need reconstructive surgery on part of his face after an officer, or officers, “stomped” on him, near Route 2 in Elsmere. She said the police at the scene later called an ambulance, which took her nephew to Nemours Children's Hospital.
“His eye, the orbital bone area, is completely damaged,” Murphy said.
The violent encounter occurred shortly after police had already converged on nearby Taft Avenue, where witnesses say officers physically forced a 17-year-old out of his home and onto the ground, before detaining him and a friend for hours within a police cruiser.
Chavuan Harris, the mother of the 17 year old, said the heat within the police car was turned up while her son was detained, despite the already-warm August temperatures.
She says police first said they targeted her son because a K9 dog led them to her home. Later, an officer called it “all a misunderstanding,” she said.
“They just came in here, bum rushed him, and didn’t ask questions or nothing,” she said.
While Harris received little information, one officer told at least two of her neighbors that police were in their neighborhood because he had been the victim of a “home invasion.”
He made the comments while going from house to house on Taft Avenue, asking the bewildered neighbors for recent Ring camera video footage that might show individuals who had recently passed along the block.
It is not clear why a state police officer who believed he was a victim of a crime would be participating in an investigation of that same crime.
Earlier that evening, Murphy said, her nephew had been playing the game of ding, dong, ditch in an adjacent neighborhood — a sort of prank that involves teenagers knocking on a door, or ringing a doorbell, then running away before it is answered.
Murphy believes her nephew and his friends inadvertently knocked on, or kicked at, the front door of a home belonging to a state police officer.
On Wednesday, Delaware State Police spokeswoman India Sturgis said one police officer has been suspended in response to an alleged assault related to the police actions on Monday.
She declined to say which incident caused the suspension, but said “digital evidence is currently being reviewed.”
When pressed, Sturgis acknowledged that prior to the police response Monday, the suspended officer’s Elsmere area house had been the target of someone knocking on its front door.
Later on Wednesday, state police released a public statement that said the agency is conducting an investigation alongside the Delaware Department of Justice.
‘Somebody’s banging at the door”
Harris said her son was terrorized by a rampaging police action, even though it was other boys who were playing the rambunctious game of ding dong ditch.
When police first knocked at her door Monday, Harris had been video chatting with her son. She was in Philadelphia. He was at their Taft Avenue house with a friend.
Just before 9 p.m., he told her that “somebody’s banging at the door.”
“I said, ‘what do you mean, somebody’s banging at the door.’ He said, ‘mom, it’s the cops,’” Harris recounted.
Harris told her son to answer the knock and find out why police were there.
But when he answered the door, officers immediately commanded him to “put your hands up, put your hands up,” Harris said.
Then, she heard him scream, “like they slammed him,” she said.
“They didn’t ask him nothing at all. They threw him on my lawn and two officers jumped on his back,” Harris said.
The commotion at the door caused a neighbor – whose home shares a wall with Harris – to peer out of her front window.
“I started looking out as they (police) were banging and they were like, ‘open up, get out of the house,’” said the neighbor, Kristy Burnette.
Burnette said police appeared to rapidly turn violent after Harris’ son opened the door, noting that she saw him fall into his front yard.
“There was no conversation,” she said. “I saw him as he was going down but I don’t know if he was pushed or pulled.”
Burnette said she later saw police leading the son’s friend out of the house in handcuffs.
Burnette’s and Harris’ other neighbors on the block also began to take notice as more police arrived at the scene.
After hearing banging, screaming, and a dog barking, Mike Miller walked out of his home, which sits about hundred feet up the road from the Harris’ house.
From his front lawn, he looked down the road and saw police cruisers without emergency lights flashing, and police officers walking around with flashlights, he said.
“I said ‘ok, no problem, I guess something’s going on down there. So I went back inside,” he said.
