According to a new video released by Arizona DREAMer Erika Andiola and covered by Buzzfeed, Teodulo Sanchez was heading home from work last Friday when he was pulled over and repeatedly threatened by a Buckeye, Arizona police officer.
As the police officer during the encounter said:
Weapons? No weapons in your car? Keep your hands where I can see them, don’t move. You hear me? You have a license? Show me your license now. If you do something, I’ll kill you here. You understand?
Watch the partial video of their confrontation below:
Teodulo Sanchez, according to Buzzfeed and Think Progress, is an undocumented immigrant with two US citizen children. His father is also a US citizen, but Teodulo’s attempt to gain legal status through his father failed when a fake attorney filed the wrong immigration paperwork. He is now in deportation proceedings and has been detained in the past even though he has no criminal record.
He said the police never told him why he was stopped; police say that the officer who stopped Teodulo was on alert because a similar car was supposedly carrying a large amount of illegal narcotics with a possible armed occupant.
Teodulo told Buzzfeed that he was afraid for his life during the encounter. As he said of the officer:
He kept telling me not to move my hands, he was really aggressive, there was no reason to put his gun in my face…I thought he was going to kill me, he was really upset.
He also said that he gave the video to Erika “so people could see what happens, they’re killing too many people in America for nothing these days…If you look Mexican, they’ll stop you.”
The Buckeye Police Department has released a statement saying that they acknowledge “the officer used a poor choice of words, and does not condone the statement made during the stop.”
