State Attorney: School resource officer who slammed Black student to ground will not face criminal charges

By Raquel Ciampi

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    OSCEOLA COUNTY, Florida (WESH) — The School Resource Officer who slammed a Black student to the ground in Osceola County will not face criminal charges, state attorney Monique Worrell announced.

Officials with the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office were sent video of the incident with the SRO in January of 2021.

In the video, you can see the white deputy, who’s been identified as Ethan Fournier, slamming the Black female student into the ground, before putting her hands behind her back at Liberty High School.

According to sheriff’s officials, Fournier was trying to break up an incident between the girl and another student before he took further action.

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump said at the time there was not a fight.

“I am just angry that a trained professional, adult man feels that he has the right to pick up and slam a young Black girl,” Crump said.

Crump called the deputy’s action “unjustifiable brutality.”

The girl’s father said she was having trouble sleeping after the incident and had problems with her memory.

Attorneys released a statement on Tuesday following the decision:

“The facts of this case are laid out for everyone to see in that disturbing video. A Black teenager was violently body-slammed to the ground, knocked unconscious, and handcuffed at her own school by Deputy Fournier. That kind of force is aggressive, unacceptable, and not at all what it looks like to de-escalate a situation between high school girls. Taylor is still feeling the repercussions from Fournier’s actions and likely will for the rest of her life. This disgusting incident certainly sends a message to our young people of color – police officers should not be trusted and ‘protect and serve’ is nothing more than a meaningless slogan. While the state attorney has failed to get justice for Taylor, we won’t stop until we do.”

The incident sparked calls from students and parents to create a new SRO policy within Osceola County Public schools — some even called to get rid of them altogether.

School board member Julius Melendez said he started the SRO Task Force at the school following the incident.

He says he created it with a mission of preventing incidents like it and creating a new uniform SRO policy to better relationships between SRO’s and students, in turn protecting both parties.

In July, the Osceola County School Board approved contracts with the sheriff’s office, Kissimmee Police, and St. Cloud Police to provide a school resource officer on each campus.

The board also passed new standards for those officers: Each will require at least 40 hours of training, must be equipped with a body camera, and it will be recommended that they issue civil citations as opposed to arrests for any non-violent criminal activity.

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