A bar owner in St. Louis, Missouri is facing criminal charges after local police crashed a patrol car through the front wall of his establishment on Monday.
Chad Morris was closing up Bar:PM just after midnight when the cruiser slammed into the building, according to local station KTVI. A probable cause statement written by an officer who arrived on the scene just after the crash alleges that Morris, 37, began to “scream obscenities” at them.
When the officer told Morris to back up so he could secure the scene, he allegedly struck him “hard in the chest with an open hand, causing me to temporarily lose my balance,” the officer wrote.
ADVERTISEMENT
The officer said Morris attempted to flee the scene, shoving a trash can at another officer, after he was told he was being placed under arrest.
Morris was initially hit with a felony charge of third-degree assault on an officer before that was reduced by prosecutors to fourth-degree assault, a misdemeanor. He was also charged with a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest. The bar owner was out of jail as of Tuesday morning, and was glimpsed with an apparent black eye, KTVI reported.
A crime summary report claims that the two probation officers in the patrol car, each with less than a year of experience on the job, “overcorrected” while passing too close to a parked vehicle, swerving across several lanes of traffic before hitting Bar:PM.
But witnesses and Morris’ husband, James Pence, claim that the police’s version of events is far from what actually happened.
Pence, who lives above Bar:PM with Morris, said he was asleep in bed when the crash occurred. “I heard a loud bang. I felt the building shake. I ran down from upstairs,” he told KTVI. The officer behind the wheel initially apologized to Pence, explaining that he’d swerved to avoid hitting a dog in the road. “He was actually extremely nice,” Pence recalled.
But Pence was also placed in handcuffs, he said, after he refused to show an officer his identification. “I was told I had to ID or shut up,” he told KSDK. Pence was not arrested or charged.
The confrontation between Morris and the officers escalated and became physical after the officers “went for him,” Pence told the Riverfront Times. “He raised his arm and they said he hit them.”
Javad Khazaeli, the couple’s attorney, told NBC News on Tuesday that their goal was to pursue accountability after having all the charges against Morris dismissed. “You can’t have police officers terrorizing people, because they’re victims of a crime. And when they asked what happened, to be treated this way,” he said.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said at a Monday news conference that the incident was still under investigation.
“I wish they would tell me truly what happened,” Pence told KTVI. “Accidents happen. Any one of us gets into an accident any day, I accept that. Own it, tell me what happened, and fix the building.”
Instead, friends and patrons gathered to help clean up and guard the scene on Monday. “This is a safe spot for people in our community. This is like our family’s place,” a friend, Giuliano Mangiore, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Bar:PM reopened on Tuesday evening, according to a post on its Facebook page.
