Twice in three months, an Ohio police officer was sued for using excessive force in two separate incidents.
Springfield police officer Justin Massie was sued on January 11 for an incident where he and other officers pried open the mouth of a man having an epileptic seizure thinking the man had swallowed illegal drugs.
Massie was sued again on April 24 by a man who said he ended up with a broken wrist when arrested by him for a warrant, even though he did not resist at all.
The latest lawsuit was filed by a man named Johnny Haney who was arrested in April 2016 on a warrant for failure to appear in court.
Haney said he was cooperative but Massie and officer Cassidy Cantrell were intentionally reckless, pulling up his handcuffed arms high behind his back, causing his wrist to break.
And even though he told the cops his wrist was broken, they took him straight to jail instead of to a hospital. And at the jail, he did not get x-rayed until the following day, which confirmed he had a displaced fracture through the scaphoid bone.
He then had to undergo surgery in the following days.
The previous lawsuit stems from an incident in July 2017 when a man named Devan Smith had accidentally locked himself out of his home and was trying to find a way to get inside when a neighbor called the cops.
Massie responded along with Springfield police officers Michael Fredendall and Kevin Hoying and immediately placed Smith in handcuffs.
After police confirmed he did live in the house,, they began interrogating him about illegal drug usage. They then entered his home and searched his room, rummaging through his prescription medication, demanding to know why he was taking them.
Smith, who has epilepsy, was still handcuffed when he went into a seizure.
But the cops suspected he had somehow managed to swallow drugs, so they pried his jaws open, not finding anything, leaving him handcuffed and laying facedown on the floor.
He ended up losing consciousness and waking up in a hospital bed, still in handcuffs, only to be released with no charges.
Carlos Miller contributed to this report.
