Baltimore police officials said 98 officers have been injured since riots broke out after the funeral of Freddie Gray. Thirteen of the officers had to be placed on medical leave, and 15 were relegated to light duty. Police Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said protesters had fired bricks, bottles, and chunks of cement at officers.
Protests continued in the city Thursday evening. Earlier in the day, police gave their own investigation into Gray’s death to the state attorney’s office.
The city still reeled from being under a state of emergency that was instituted on Monday after violence, looting, and arson ran rampant after Gray’s funeral. The curfew initiated Tuesday night meant no one could be on the streets between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Hundreds of protesters marched to City Hall, among them Baltimore native and NBA star Carmelo Anthony.
The curfew prompted a protest from Deborah Jeon, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, which wrote Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake asking her to eliminate the curfew. Jeon had even more to say, blasting, “The ability to walk freely in public without police interference, as long as no laws are being broken, is a fundamental part of living in a free country, and necessary to the exercise of all First Amendment freedoms, including spontaneous expressive activity. Restricting it exacerbates, rather than solves, Baltimore’s current problems.”
Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts cautiously stated, “We still have a weekend to make it through,” adding that the police would not accept any excuse for breaking the curfew and saying, “This is not playtime.” Batts asserted that the data collected by Baltimore police regarding Gray’s death was sent to State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby a day earlier than their self-imposed deadline. Mosby will have to decide whether to press charges against the six officers who arrested and transported Gray when he died.
Mosby said, “While we have and will continue to leverage the information received by the Department, we are not relying solely on their findings but rather the facts that we have gathered and verified. We ask for the public to remain patient and peaceful and to trust the process of the justice system.”
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told the National Action Network, “We will get justice for Freddie Gray, we will do it if we work together. I have wanted to serve the people of Baltimore since I was a child and did everything I could to put myself position to do so. I know we have had problems, I was trying to fix them. We can be better than what I’ve seen.”
Batts stressed how hard the police have worked to investigate the case, using over 30 investigators on the case, as he stated, “We have exhausted every lead at this point. But this does not mean the investigation is over.”
Police acknowledged that the police van transporting Gray made four stops between his arrest and his arrival at the police station, video of one of the stops had been procured. Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis would only say, “This new stop was discovered from a privately owned camera.”
The prisoner who shared the van with Gray, Donta Allen, came forward to dismiss a report in the Washington Post that he had said Gray was “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and that the prisoner believed that Gray “was intentionally trying to injure himself.”
Allen told WJZ-TV, “All I did was go straight to the station, but I heard a little banging, like he was banging his head… They trying to make it seem like I told them that, I made it like Freddie Gray did that to his self. Why the [expletive] would he do that to his self?”
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