On March 31, three Black teenage girls, 16-year-old Dominique Battle, 15-year-old Ashaunti Butler, and 15-year-old LaNiya Miller, drowned while trapped in a car in St. Petersburg, Fla. The girls were reportedly driving a stolen car when police chased them into a cemetery. In an attempt to escape the officers, they drove into a pond located inside the cemetery. Within five minutes the car was submerged in water and the girls had died.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s office reported that the officers on the scene did all they could to save the three teenage girls. However, dash cam footage from one of the police cars contradicts the Sheriff’s account.
“What we see in the video is a couple of nonchalant officers talking about how they can hear the girls screaming and saying ‘those girls are done’. They just sort of repeated ‘they’re done, they’re done’… as if they had already made a decision about whether or not the girls were going to live or die,” says Dream Defenders organizer Ashley Green.
One of the officers, Deputy Logan Tromer, claims to have attempted a rescue but suspended his efforts due to the “unknown depth, thick vegetation and officer safety concerns.” Tromer is on the Sheriff’s Office dive team and the pond is a mere 15 feet deep. Family members and the St. Pete community do not believe that the effort was genuine.
“It seems like more could have and should have been attempted to really save these girls’ lives. There have been similar situations where they have made more vigorous attempts and actually saved people,” says Green.
“The officers did not immediately throw their belts to the side like the sheriff was saying. They got out of the car, they listened to them scream, and watched them,” says Chris Wilson, organizer with Black Lives Matter Tampa.
Green and fellow Dream Defender Chardonnay Singleton say that there is suspicion around the unreleased footage. “As of now, we have not seen the dash cam video of the primary officer who pursued the girls. Nor have we seen the videos from the helicopter that actually filmed and pursued this whole thing,” said Singleton.
In what has become a predictable act of dehumanization, the Sherriff’s Office and local news immediately released mugshots of the three girls when they died. Meanwhile, Pinellas County Sherriff Bob Gaultieri blamed the deaths of the girls on the “epidemic” of auto theft in Pinellas County. “Some people quite frankly, they need a kick in the tail end. These kinds of people…don’t need a hug, they need a kick in the tail end,” claimed Gualtieri, speaking at the County Commission soon after the deaths.
“We find it very problematic that after these girls’ deaths, there was such an intentional campaign by the Sheriff’s Office to paint these children as bad people,” Singleton told Liberation. “We think that this is what anti-Blackness produces in our police officers in general, a mentality that our children are hardened and worthless criminals.”
The real epidemic, both nationally and in Florida, is that of racism. It manifests in the form of police murders and harassment, underfunded public school systems, high rates of poverty and unemployment, environmental injustice and outright demonization.
Many Black and Latino youth have needlessly died at the hands of law enforcement in Pinellas County and the Tampa Bay Area in recent years. Marquell McCullough, Tyron Lewis, Javon Dawson, Rodney Mitchell, Elias Guadarama, and Andrew Joseph III are just a few examples.
Despite only making up 34 percent of the population, Black youth in St. Petersburg made up 58 percent of all youth arrests in 2014-2015. They made up 65 percent of all felony offenses, and they made up 70 percent of children that were tried as adults, compared to white youth who made up only 23 percent of children tried as adults.
Black youth in St. Petersburg are abandoned even at the elementary school level. In 2007, the Pinellas County school board called for a “neighborhood schools” system, resulting in de facto racial segregation. Since then, five majority-Black elementary schools in the area have been ranked among the worst in the state of Florida due to severe lack of money and resources.
Chris Wilson told Liberation how deeply this affects members of the Black community: “It’s a situation where you grow up and you learn to hate yourself, and you learn to idolize white skin because that’s what your society says is correct. If we are not finding ways to give our youth mercy, understanding, and compassion then I don’t know how we’re going to move forward.”
Local activists and family members are now calling for the release of the rest of the dash cam footage, as well as an independent and thorough investigation of the events. The community demands that the officers be held accountable.
Yashica Clemmons, the mother of Dominique Battle, announced on Tuesday that she will be filing a lawsuit against the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
