THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 17, 1995 TAG: 9501170405
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Short : 43 lines
The lawyer for a 15-year-old Gloucester High School student hurt during a fight with three deputies at a basketball game this month said Monday he would seek a federal inquiry of the incident.
Stephen Merrill, a Norfolk attorney who is representing Adair Rhodes, wrote a letter to Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert J. Seidel Jr. asking him to ``investigate this incident for violations of civil rights laws. . . . There was simply no justification for what happened.''
According to witness accounts, the teenager suffered a gash on his head when he hit a pillar while wrestling with two deputies as a third sprayed him with pepper gas. Rhodes is black; the deputies are white.
Witnesses said the fight began when the deputies, who were providing security at the Jan. 6 game between Gloucester and Denbigh High School, were called by other students to talk to a student who was blocking a doorway.
Sheriff Robin P. Stanaway said a review of the incident showed his deputies used the minimum force necessary to stop an escalating situation.
The sheriff said one of the deputies asked the youth to move, but he refused. ``He wanted a confrontation, and he got one,'' he told local Gloucester newspaper last week.
Stanaway described the incident as ``anti-authority'' and denied it had any racial overtones.
The sheriff was out of his office Monday and could not be reached for comment on the request for a federal probe. Federal offices were closed Monday in observance of the Martin Luther King holiday and Seidel could not be reached.
Rhodes' parents issued a statement through Merrill that called the deputies' actions ``a brutal, entirely unjustified assault.''
Rhodes' head injury required four stitches. by CNB