SEATTLE — There’s more to the story of a YouTube video posted Thursday that purported to show a shoplifting suspect being taken down by Bartell Drugs security guards at a store in Lake City.
The man who shot the video told KIRO 7 he thought the guards were too rough, but it turns out the man delivering most of the punches to the suspect in the video didn’t even work for the store.
“I was scared for the guy, the guy who was getting beat up. He was calling out for help,” said Musa Uke, who took the video with his cell phone.
Uke wanted others to see the video and uploaded it to YouTube, where he described it as a video of “A suspected thief getting beat down by Bartell Drugs employs and there undercover security guards all cause the kid stole some toothbrush, was this the right amount of force to be used you decide.....”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9AyuUuLh5w
Asked if he thought the people in the video were too rough with the suspect, Uke said yes.
“Yeah, it was too rough,” he said. “You can clearly see on the video they were punching him in the ribs. I mean, come on, that’s not right.”
Theron Andrews, the marketing vice president for Bartell Drugs, said the man being hit in the video was suspected of putting a $150 Sonicare toothbrush down his pants. When he was approached by Bartell employees, he ran outside the store.
“They pursued him out the store, as they’re trained to do, and they went to restrain him,” Andrews said.
He said one Bartell employee did use a sweep kick to get him down on the ground so staffers could handcuff him. But the man wearing a green jacket in the video, doing all the punching, is not a store employee; simply a bystander who jumped in to help.
“Our loss prevention team actually asked him to step away and not get involved because they had (the suspect) well in hand,” Andrews said. “We obviously don’t condone that, and we didn’t ask for or need his particular help at that point.”
The suspect, 22-year-old Tristen Watson, was taken to the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct and then to the King County Jail for investigation of theft, according to the police report. The report makes no mention of Watson needing medical attention.
Watson was wanted on a misdemeanor warrant out of Bonney Lake for failing to appear in court on a criminal trespass charge.