Police violence sparks disability rights movement

[KamaAina]

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/12/police-violence-ethansaylordownsyndromedisabilityrights.html

You’ve heard this story before: A large man was confronted by law enforcement officials over a minor issue. He didn’t initially comply with their orders, so they grabbed him and put him on the ground. In the process, the man asphyxiated. The law enforcement officers were not charged by a grand jury.

This tale is not about Eric Garner, but about Ethan Saylor. Ethan, a 26-year-old man from New Market, Maryland, with Down syndrome, died almost two years ago on January 12, 2013. He was killed over the price of a movie ticket, breathing his last on the floor of a cinema, asking for his mother.

He had gone into Frederick, Maryland, to see “Zero Dark Thirty,” watched it, and then decided he wanted to see it again. The cinema manager called three off-duty-deputies who were moonlighting as security guards, and they decided to evict Saylor from the theater. After Saylor didn’t comply with their orders, the deputies ignored his aide. They refused to wait until Ethan’s mother, Patti, arrived to defuse the situation. Instead, they got physical and handcuffed him. In the process, his trachea was fractured and he died.

For almost nine months, the story of this tragedy was mostly limited to the local area and the disability community. Gradually, though, the efforts of Saylor’s family and many writers and advocates managed to get some attention to the story, and then pushed the state of Maryland to respond.

#disabledlivesmatter

[Mnemosyne]

1. K&R for more visibility. nt

[Ilsa]

2. Kick & Rec nt

[ellenrr]

3. terrible. yes disabled lives matter. nt

[UglyGreed]

4. +1000

A sober reminder that Hitler killed the disabled first.....

http://ww2history.com/key_moments/Holocaust/Hitler_authorizes_killing_of_disabled

It was in order to give formal legitimation to this operation that Hitler signed the document he did in October 1939. Then, over the next 20 months, the T4 team organized the killing of 70,000 to 90,000 disabled people. In order to deal with this many people a new system of murder was developed. In several asylums, like Sonnenstein in east Germany, special fake ‘shower’ rooms were built. Once the patients entered these rooms, any suspicions lulled because they thought they were about to take a shower, carbon monoxide gas was pumped into the room in order to kill them. This technique, pioneered in the killing of the disabled, was later to appear in modified form as a method of murdering the Jews.