A woman says she was mistaken for the suspect in a police chase and is now seeking an apology from the state trooper who apprehended her.
Erika Strickland says that instead of pulling over the right motorcyclist, the trooper stopped her, slammed her to the ground and pointed a gun at her face.
Strickland, a jail supervisor in the metro Atlanta area, wants the Georgia State Patrol to apologize for how it treated her.
Strickland became emotional when she told Channel 2’s Tom Jones how she was humiliated and thought she was going to lose her life.
”Words cannot explain the way I felt of having a gun in my face and then being slammed to the ground for something that I didn't do,” Strickland said. “I had to be on the ground like that. That is just really embarrassing to me.”
Her nightmare began when troopers chased a motorcycle for 21 miles on Highway 185, then lost sight of it.
That's when trooper W.E Tatum pulled over Strickland, who was on a similar motorcycle.
Tatum admits pushing Strickland to the ground and pointing his weapon at her because he says she didn't put her hands up.
She said her bike would have jerked if she had.
”I knew if I would have let go and the bike did that jerking movement, I would have gotten shot,” Strickland said.
Another officer arrived and told Tatum that Strickland wasn't the one they were chasing.
Jones filed an open records request to get the video of Tatum taking her to the ground. The department told Jones that it couldn't be retrieved from a hard drive.
They sent video from a second trooper that doesn't show the takedown. The video shows that the person they were chasing was wearing a reflective vest.
Strickland was not wearing such a vest.
The person being chased didn't appear to have on a pink Mohawk helmet, as Strickland was wearing at the time.
Strickland, a breast cancer survivor, became emotional when she heard herself crying on the video, asking the troopers why they treated her this way.
”I mean, that's bad when you haven't done anything. That's bad,” Strickland said.
