Lawyer: Police smashed car of trapped mom, tot

PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia officials plan to release the police body camera footage Wednesday of the encounter that led officers to fatally shoot Walter Wallace Jr., the latest in a line of police killings of Black people to roil the U.S. this year.

The announcement came as National Guard soldiers arrived in town Friday to help control the unrest and monitor the contentious election Tuesday; the city reinstated an overnight curfew; and new details emerged about a harrowing video that shows police smashing in the windows of a vehicle driven by a Black woman who found herself trapped during the demonstrations with her toddler in a rear car seat.

The National FOP posted a picture of the small boy in the arms of a female police officer after his mother was detained, saying he had been found wandering around barefoot during the protests. The post was soon taken down.

Home health aide Rickia Young, 28, had been watching the late news Monday night when she saw that protests over Wallace’s death had broken out in West Philadelphia, said her lawyer, Kevin Mincey. She decided to retrieve her 16-year-old nephew from the area, and put her 2-year-old son in the car.

Young took her usual route home only to drive into the fray at about 1:45 a.m. as police clashed with demonstrators. Police told her to turn around. But as she attempted a K-turn, Mincey said, officers swarmed her car, broke windows and injured her and her nephew as they pulled them from the vehicle.

Young spent the next few hours at police headquarters and at a hospital, as she was bruised and bleeding from the head. She asked her mother to try to find the child, who had been pulled from the vehicle by police. The grandmother finally found him in a police cruiser, with a welt on his head and glass in his car seat, Mincey said.