Assemblywoman says she watched police beat man

Keith Paul

Monday, Sept. 17, 2001 | 10:19 a.m.

A state lawmaker was to meet with Metro Police internal affairs investigators today over an incident she said she witnessed in which six officers held down a man and beat him.

Assemblywoman Kathy Von Tobel said she called police to file a complaint after she and her boyfriend saw the officers pummel a man with batons for 30 minutes early Thursday.

"They were beating the man and he wasn't resisting. He was just moaning and screaming," the Las Vegas Republican said. "It just made me sick."

Metro opened an internal investigation Friday into the assemblywoman's allegations, but few details were available, Metro spokesman Sgt. Christopher Darcy said.

Two officers had been called to a convenience store Thursday at 12:33 a.m. at Las Vegas Boulevard South and Pebble Road. A man was said to be acting strangely. Darcy said when officers arrived, the man was shadow boxing a gasoline pump.

The name of the man and of the officers involved were not available this morning. A copy of a police report also was not available this morning.

An American Medical Response ambulance and crew were called to the scene at 12:54 a.m. Thursday. The paramedics took the man to a hospital, AMR spokeswoman Tammy Bame said. She didn't know which hospital.

Bame said the dispatch log shows paramedics were called by Metro on a possible overdose or a mentally ill person. She said the dispatch log has no detail of what, if any, injuries the man had.

Von Tobel said it was not a case of police simply taking a man into custody.

The assemblywoman said the flashing lights of police cars woke her early Thursday. She and her boyfriend went out on the balcony of their apartment and saw the officers surrounding a man in a desert area at least several hundred feet from the store.

Von Tobel said she and her boyfriend hid on the balcony as they watched the officers. She didn't yell out, she said, because she was afraid. Her apartment is about 200 feet from where the officers were. She also did not call police.

"I didn't call, because they were the police. I thought, 'How do you dial 911 when they are the police?' " she said. "The guy was just screaming and moaning the whole time. They continued to beat him unit there was silence."

Von Tobel said some of the officers took turns hitting the man with batons as other officers held him down on the police car.

"Why did they keep beating on him?" she said. "He wasn't even resisting. There was no reason for this."

She said a Metro lieutenant questioned why she would talk publicly about her allegations, suggesting she was just looking for some media attention she could use politically.

Von Tobel, who was first elected in 1996 and re-elected twice, said she is not running for office again and her motivation was just to ensure that her claims were investigated.

"I wish that I didn't feel it wouldn't be investigated," she said. "What I saw was a crime, and to say that I was trying to get some political gain out of it is wrong."