Quantavious Eason was put in the back of a patrol car and taken to the police station after relieving himself in a parking lot while his mother ran an errand.
A 10-year-old child who was arrested for urinating in a parking lot has been placed on probation for the incident.
Quantavious Eason was arrested by the Senatobia Police Department in Mississippi back in August, after the child reportedly decided to relieve himself near her car while she made a quick stop into a lawyer’s office.
During a court hearing this week, the boy was given three months probation and assigned a two-page book report about Kobe Bryant, the family’s attorney Carlos Moore told CNN. The offense will not go on the boy’s record, though he is required to check in with a probation officer once a month for three months.
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“We are not going to appeal. He will not have a criminal record, this is probation. And he is a fan of Kobe Bryant, so he doesn’t mind writing the two-page report,” Moore told NBC News. “But, still, the principle of it — he should not have to do anything. He should be enjoying his Christmas holiday like the other kids.”
Added the child’s mother, Latonya: “My son is going through enough getting arrested, and then for him having to see a probation officer and then write an essay, I don’t think it’s right or it’s fair. The average child would use the bathroom outside .. and probably some grown men that would do the same thing.”
Both Latonya and Moore have said they believe race played a factor in the boy’s arrest.
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During a press conference back in September, Moore said that the child needed to use the bathroom while waiting for his mother. He saw a sign saying there were no public restrooms, however, and “had a decision to make.”
“Do I let my bladder stay full and potentially cause bladder problems or do I relieve myself discreetly on private property?” said the family’s attorney. “He did what so many young boys have done in this city time and time again, he got near his mother’s car with his back facing the public road and he relieved himself.”
Though Moore said the child was “thinking as a reasonable 10-year-old” when he decided to relieve himself, an officer driving by stopped and went into the lawyer’s office to alert the boy’s mother.
“I said, ‘You know better, don’t let it happen again,'” Eason recalled telling her son after coming out with the officer. “The officer said, ‘You handled that like a mom, just make sure he don’t do it again, he can get back in the car.'”
But then four other officers from the department showed up, said Eason, claiming they then instructed Quantavious to “put his hands behind his back” before putting him into a patrol car and taking him downtown to the station. “My baby was crying,” said LaTonya, who also snapped a photo of the boy in the backseat.
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After being taken to the station, Eason claims authorities then “put this boy in a cage for 45-minutes to an hour” while she spoke with officers about an unrelated matter. The boy was later charged in Youth Court with Child in Need of Supervision. Per Moore, the incident happened on private property and “nobody who owns that property has complained to law enforcement” about the boy’s actions.
After the incident went viral thanks to Eason’s photo of her son, the police department released two statements on what happened. In the first, they said that while “the child was not handcuffed,” they admitted “it was an error in judgment for us to transport the child to the police station” since authorities were able to locate a parent at the scene.
“Mistakes like this are a reminder in this profession as to the continual need for training and refreshers on the various topics that we encounter each day,” they added.
About a week later, Chief of Police Richard Chandler released a second statement saying, “The officer’s decisions violated our written policy and went against our prior training on how to deal with these situations.”
“One of the officers involved is no longer employed, and the others will be disciplined,” they added. “We will also have mandatory Juvenile training department-wide, just as we do every year.”
“You don’t put my child in a cage,” Latonya said at the time. “Would you have put a white child in a cage? If it had been a white child, you know what, he probably wouldn’t have even stopped.”
Moore, meanwhile, told NBC he’s planning to fire a federal lawsuit against the city of Senatobia and the arresting officer.
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