Laurel Ripple, 21, is everything we say we want our young people to be -- smart, driven, socially conscious.
When she was a senior at MAST Academy, Laurel delivered 3,000
postcards to Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas, signed by high school
students opposed to his plan to build an airport on the edge of the Everglades.
A member of the Sierra Club since she was a teenager, Ripple spent the last six months encouraging college students like herself to come to Miami and oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
On Nov. 21, Laurel was part of a vigil outside the county jail
for the protesters arrested the day before. After three hours, the
Miami-Dade police ordered everyone to leave. As anyone who watched the
scene unfold live on television
can attest, the police moved forward into the crowd of 100 people,
cutting off about 40 protesters and trapping them against a chain link
fence.
''The front line of the police all had shields, and they kept
pushing in, pinning us against the fence,'' recalls Laurel, who grew up
in South Miami. After a few minutes, Laurel said she fell to the ground
and covered her head, whereupon an officer grabbed her wrists with one
hand, lifted her arms and began blasting her with pepper spray.
''I started screaming in pain,'' Laurel says. ``He had held the
canister so close to my face that my hair and face were dripping with
pepper spray.''
In the melee, she said she badly twisted her ankle. She was taken
to a makeshift jail in Earlington Heights for processing and
decontamination.
''Because I couldn't walk, they dragged me,'' she recalls. ``They
had a shower set up in the parking lot. Two officers held me up as I
was drenched for a few seconds with water. I was then dragged into this
tent. It was dark. There were four men in white biohazard suits. I'm
still coughing and crying from the pepper spray. I can't really tell
what is happening.''
With her hands still bound behind her back, she said she felt her
T-shirt coming apart. ''That's when I realized they had scissors and
they were cutting my clothes off of me,'' she says.
She said she begged them to stop, saying she could take her own
clothes off. And she asked why there wasn't a female officer present.
''They didn't say anything to me,'' she says, her hands shaking as she
lights a cigarette. ``No one ever said a word to me while they were
doing this.
``After they cut my shirt off, they cut off my jeans and my
underwear. I'm standing there totally naked. I felt completely violated.
It was humiliating.''
Wearing a set of surgical scrubs, she was booked into jail
barefoot, and claims she never received medical attention for her ankle.
Her criminal charge: unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor.
Sgt. Pete Andreu, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade Police
Department, said he could neither confirm nor deny Laurel was
pepper-sprayed by police. The ''chemical agent'' could have been
released by one of the protesters, he said. He also doubted she ever
asked for medical help. The decontamination, he added, was done by the
Miami-Dade Fire Department.
The fire department said Laurel received standard treatment for
''gross decontamination.'' ''If we had permitted her to remove her own
clothes, she could have recontaminated herself,'' said fire department
spokesman Lt. Eugene Germain Jr.
I wonder how Penelas or Miami Mayor Manny Diaz would feel if their wives or their children were put through such a process.
Jonathan Ullman, South Florida field representative for the Sierra Club, saw Laurel being arrested on television.
''She's a great kid,'' he says. ``I couldn't believe it.''
Ullman called the Washington office of the Sierra Club, which
dispatched attorneys to get Laurel out of jail within a few hours. The
Sierra Club's executive director wrote President Bush this month
demanding a Justice Department investigation into Laurel's arrest and
the allegations of police misconduct made by other Sierra Club members.
So far, there has been no response. Laurel's next court date is Dec. 30.
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