The Ohio mom who was Tased and arrested in the stands of a grade-school football game had refused to wear a mask because she has asthma and was keeping more than the recommended six feet of distance from other fans, her attorney said.
Alecia Kitts was sitting in the bleachers when she got into a caught-on-camera confrontation with a school resource officer over her lack of mask Wednesday at a middle school in the town of Logan, news station WCMH reported.
“Ms. Kitts explained to the policy officer and administrators that she has asthma, but they ignored her,” her attorney, Maurice A. Thompson, told the outlet.
“Their position was that un-masked asthmatic must leave the stadium, (which) is not consistent with any directive or other law.”
He said the mom was “obviously alone with her children, outdoors, at a distance of much greater than six feet from anyone else.”
“Thus, she broke no Ohio law, not even the Governor’s own legally-dubious health directives upon which the school relied,” Thompson said.
Logan police have said that Kitts was asked to leave and then ejected as a trespasser when she failed to comply with the cop’s orders.
Footage shows Kitts resisting as the officer struggles to handcuff her for nearly two minutes before he deploys his Taser to her right shoulder and escorted her out of the bleachers.
She was charged with criminal trespassing and released at the scene, authorities said.
“She committed no crime and thus committed no ‘criminal trespass,’” Thompson said. “Logan School District totally misapplied the law, and misapplied it haphazardly and violently.”
