A horrifying video shows a police officer violently smashing a suspect’s face into the ground during an arrest.
Patrolman Ronald Williams, from the New Castle Police Department, Pennsylvania, has been placed on administrative leave after the footage of the violent arrest on Monday went viral.
The video, shot by an onlooker on his cellphone, showed Perry Lowry, 49, lying on the floor, face down, as two officers restrained him.
One officer was then seen grabbing the man’s head and repeatedly, forcibly slamming it on the ground.
A terrified onlooker could be heard pleading with the officers, telling them, ‘don’t kill him.’
When the officer finally stopped banging the man’s head on the floor, the suspect lay there, un-moving and apparently unconscious.
‘I think he’s dead,’ the filming onlooker said. The video has already been more than three million times on Facebook.
A photo of the scene, after the arrest, shows the blood splattered floor where the man’s head had split open during the attack.
The suspect was taken the hospital and treated for the cuts to his head, before he was taken to the Lawrence County Jail where he was charged with simple assault, harassment and resisting arrest.
The incident began when police received a call at 5.34 pm on April 23 over an alleged domestic disturbance at a home in New Castle, involving an intoxicated white male, who had assaulted a juvenile male.
Police say that when they arrived, the man attempted to run to the kitchen. They also note a kitchen knife was lying on the counter.
The officers tasered the man three times before they concede that ‘the second officer subdued the intoxicated male through force.’
The officer involved in the use of force has been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation.
‘The New Castle City Police Department takes every allegation of the use force very seriously. The NCPD is one of the first Police Departments in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to convene a Use of Force Board Hearing upon any allegation of force potentially outside NCPD policies and procedures,’ they said in a statement.