L.A. Liberty

The Youngest Victim of Police Abuse →

Levii Dozier is only four months old, but he’s already been assaulted by the police.

Roughly five months ago, Levii’s mother Raven Dozier was present when her brother got embroiled in a child custody dispute with a girlfriend. After the police arrived, Raven did what she could to calm her brother down. Eventually one of the officers shot the agitated man with a Taser. A thugscrum quickly coalesced as several officers inflicted gratuitous punishment on the prone and helpless man while his sister – who had been assisting the police – looked on in horror.

“He’s on the ground!” shrieked Dozier, who was in tears. “You don’t need to do that!”

“Shut the f**k up!” replied one of the gallant officers. When Dozier failed to act on that thoughtful suggestion, Officer Jarad Wheeler strode up to her and kicked her in the stomach with sufficient force to open a door.

At the time, Raven Dozier was nine months pregnant.

For about fifteen minutes, the DeKalb County officers conferred with a supervisor outside the house — within earshot of Raven’s brother, who was sitting, handcuffed, in the back of a police car.

“He kicked a pregnant woman,” one of the officers reported.

“You’ve got to charge her with something,” another replied, pointing out that doing so would magically transmute aggravated assault into a “justified” use of force.

Following the discussion outside, several officers re-entered the home, where Dozier was on a couch trying to regain her composure.

In a voice suppurating feigned concern, one of them asked if they could take a picture of the traumatized mother; in the same affected tone, he asked her if she could trouble herself to put on a pair of shoes and step outside the house for a moment to talk with the supervisor.

As soon as Raven had crossed the threshold of her home, she was placed under arrest for “obstruction.”

To their credit, officials at DeKalb County Jail refused to book Dozier. Instead they sent her to a nearby hospital, where she passed a small amount of blood and amniotic fluid. . A photograph of Raven taken after Wheeler’s assault displayed a huge bruise across Dozier’s abdomen. Two weeks later she gave birth to Levii by way of an emergency C-section.

Atlanta attorney Mark Bullman, who is representing Raven Dozier in a lawsuit, recalled to Pro Libertate that the doctors who treated Raven and delivered Levii “found that the kick was severe enough that it caused the baby to defecate in the womb.”

What this means is that Levii literally had the sh*t kicked out of him by a bullying cop before he was born.

In his official report of the incident, Wheeler did what police in such circumstances always do: He lied, claiming that he was dealing with an “aggressive” woman and that he used “a front push kick to the abdomen, as [I] was taught to do at the academy.” It was only after he arrested this “aggressive” woman that he supposedly noticed her condition.

“Her condition was obvious to everyone,” Bullman – himself a retired police officer – explains. “She had gained seventy pounds in this pregnancy. The incident took place in a well-lit area, and she had spent a great deal of time standing alongside the police officers, attempting to calm her brother down and resolve the situation.” Furthermore, as the comments overheard by Dozier’s brother demonstrate, every officer on the scene was aware of the expectant mother’s condition – and all of them instinctively collaborated in covering up the crime committed against her.

That cover-up continued “all the way up the chain of command,” Bullman observes. “There was no ambiguity about the facts, but this didn’t matter.” The department exonerated Wheeler, ruling that his felonious assault on Raven and her unborn child was “within policy.”

This was at least the third time the DeKalb County Police Department has validated criminal acts committed by Officer Jarad Wheeler. On an earlier occasion, he attacked a 53-year-old grandmother who was trying to help her grandchildren following an automobile accident, slamming her face-first into the hood of his car. Earlier this year, Wheeler – who had responded to the wrong address – shot and killed a dog that was chained up inside its owner’s garage.