They were stuck in traffic, a young couple looking to grab a bite to eat on a Saturday night.
Their date was interrupted by a group of Atlanta police officers, who confronted Messiah Young, a Morehouse College senior, and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Taniyah Pilgrim, at Centennial Olympic Park Drive and Andrew Young International Boulevard.
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“We felt like we were going to die in that car,” Pilgrim, a psychology major at Spelman College, told reporters Monday.
They still don’t know why now-former APD investigators Mark Gardner and Ivory Streeter acted so aggressively. Using a billy club, one of the officers smashed the driver’s side window. The couple were Tased and thrown to the ground for no apparent cause.
Young suffered a fractured arm and a cut that required 20 stitches.
He spent the night in jail. Pilgrim spent hours in the back of a paddywagon before she was released without explanation or apology.
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“You got the wrong ones this time,” said Young’s attorney, Mawuli Davis, adding his client has never been arrested and, contrary to previous reports, did not have a gun in his car.
Davis said he believes Young, 22, was targeted because he was using his cell phone video to capture the chaos unfolding on the streets of Atlanta.
Young, quiet and physically unassuming, still appeared a bit shellshocked some 42 hours after the incident occurred.
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“This has truly been one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced in my life,” he said.
Gardner and Streeter were fired Sunday; three other officers on the scene were reassigned to desk duty and remain under investigation.
Pilgrim said one of those three officers told her, “He was going to shoot us.” She identified him as Officer A. Jones.
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