Lawyer: Mom, child trapped in crowd when cops smashed car

A National Guardsman stands by the Philadelphia Municipal Services Building on Friday.

PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia officials plan to release the police body camera footageWednesday of the encounter that led officers to fatally shoot Walter Wallace Jr., the latest in a line of police killings of Black people to roil the U.S. this year.

The announcement came as National Guard soldiers arrived in town Friday to help control the unrest and monitor the contentious election Tuesday; the city reinstated an overnight curfew; and new details emerged about a harrowing video that shows police smashing in the windows of a vehicle driven by a Black woman who found herself trapped during the demonstrations with her toddler in a rear car seat.

The National FOP posted a picture of the small boy in the arms of a female police officer after his mother was detained, saying he had been found wandering aroundbarefoot during the protests. The postwas soon taken down.

“Just imagine the vitriol she’s getting on social media about what kind of a parent she is? How could she be out there? It’s infuriating,” said lawyer Kevin Mincey, who represents home health aide Rickia Young.

Young, 28, had been watching the news Monday night when she saw that protests overWallace’s death had broken out in West Philadelphia. She decided to retrieve her 16year-old nephew from the area and put her 2-year-old son in the car, lest she leave him home alone. She also hoped the toddler might finally fall asleep.

Young took her usual route home only to drive into the fray at about 1:45 a.m. as police clashed with demonstrators. Police told her to turn around. But as she attempted aK-turn, the video shows, officers swarmed her car, broke windows and injured her and her nephew as they pulled them from the vehicle

Young spent the next few hours at police headquarters and at a hospital, as she was bruised and bleeding from the head. She asked her mother to try to find the child, who had been pulled from the vehicle by police. The grandmother finally foundhimin a police cruiser, with awelt on his head and glass in his car seat, Mincey said.

Both Young and the boy, who is hearing impaired, are traumatized, Mincey said. The FOP post, he said, painted “officers as heroes of the community, when in actuality, they were the terrorists of this incident.”

National FOP spokesperson Jessica Cahill said the post was taken down when it “subsequently learned of conflicting accounts of the circumstances.”

Young was never charged, although a bracelet put on her arm at police headquarters suggested she was detained for allegedly assaulting police, Mincey said.

The city has seen a spate of mischief and mayhem along with the protests this week, as an estimated 1,000 people broke into stores to steal merchandise, 50 police were injured and 22 attempts made to steal ATMs.

“Philadelphians are experiencing an immense amount of pain, and significant unrest persists throughout the entire city,” city officials saidFriday in a statement issued jointly with the district attorney and theWallace family.

The parties said they hoped “that releasing the recordings on Nov. 4 will provide enough time to calm tensions and for the recordings to be released in the most constructive manner possible.”

A wake and funeral for Wallace has been scheduled forNov. 7.