BLYTHEVILLE, Ark. – A wheelchair-bound man recovering from a shooting is claiming Blytheville police officers used unnecessary force when arresting him earlier this week.
Maleke Dority, 21, said he was visiting Blytheville from Little Rock when bullets struck his right leg in two places during a random shooting several weeks ago.
“I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Dority said.
His injuries have left Dority confined to a wheelchair and in excruciating pain. He said he was recovering from surgery at his aunt’s house on Monday when Blytheville police officers arrived.
“They just came in with guns all out,” said Rosie McDougal, Dority’s aunt.
Dority and McDougal said the officers stated Dority had a warrant out for a battery charge — one Dority said he had been unaware of.
He said tensions reached fever pitch when he criticized the officers’ attitudes.
“Like I told them, you know what I’m saying, ‘Y’all could ask me more better, respectful,’” Dority said.
At that point, McDougal said officers grabbed her nephew.
“Jacked his leg. Roughed him around in the chair and then when they were getting him out the door, the chair was just bam, bam, bam all down,” she said.
“That hurted me, hurted me real bad,” Dority said.
A relative filming on her cell phone captured officers foisting Dority out of his wheelchair and into the back of a squad car. The video doesn’t show what happened before that.
“Once he set me halfway in the vehicle, he went on the opposite side and opened the door and grabbed my waist and pulled me in some more,” Dority said.
Dority said he spent the next two days in the Mississippi County Jail, where he said his cries for help went ignored.
“I end up falling off the stretcher,” he said, recounting a time he attempted to use the toilet.
When Dority was finally released, he said he was in worse shape than he was before and that he had to return to the hospital.
“I was in my wheelchair like this, sir. Mouth foaming up, spit coming out my mouth,” he said.
Dority said he called to file an Internal Affairs complaint with the Blytheville Police Department, but was told that the police chief was out of town.
WREG left messages with both the Blytheville Police Department and the jail administrator at the Mississippi County Sheriff’s Office, but have not gotten a response.
