'I can't die like this': Video shows trans man beaten by deputy during stop
Emmett Brock thought he was dying, and his mind raced. This isn't supposed to happen to me. This doesn't happen this way. I can't die like this.
He tasted the blood inside his mouth. He felt the fists land on his head. And he heard the shouts of the sheriff's deputy on top of him, pressing him into the pavement of the 7-Eleven parking lot.
Three minutes later, the 23-year-old teacher sat in the back of a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department cruiser not even knowing, he said, why the deputy had stopped him.
Brock was sent to the Norwalk station lockup and booked for three felonies. When he told the staff he is a transgender man, he said, they asked to see his genitals before deciding which holding cell to send him to.
That was in February. Brock is now jobless and still facing criminal charges, all stemming from a traffic stop the deputy said was based on an air freshener he'd spotted hanging from Brock's rearview mirror.
The Sheriff's Department has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks for two other use-of-force incidents caught on camera, including one in which a deputy punched a woman in the face while trying to take her child. In that case, Sheriff Robert Luna condemned the incident as" and relieved the deputy of duty..
