Cop in Bar:PM Arrest Was Accused of Breaking Arrestee’s Bones in 2019

The St. Louis Police officer accused of assaulting Bar:PM co-owner Chad Morris was accused of assaulting a bystander to a 2019 incident, causing serious injuries including multiple broken bones. That incident took place just a short distance from Bar:PM. 

The same officer can be seen in bystander video taken early Monday morning after a police SUV slammed into the LGBTQ bar, says attorney Brian Stokes. (Police records identify the officer only as R.W.)

Bar co-owner James Pence is placed in handcuffs when the person taking the video asks what crime Pence committed. The officer responds, "A disturbance."

The officer then approaches the person shooting the video and says, “He's not going to yell at me, that's causing a disturbance." 

According to attorney Javad Khazeali, that same officer later roughed up the bar's other co-owner, Chad Morris, in a gangway alongside the bar. 

Morris was charged with felony assault for allegedly shoving an officer. He was taken into custody and held for a day and half before being released. (His charge has since been lowered to a misdemeanor.)

Morris emerged from the jail on Tuesday sporting a black eye and bruises. 

“As you can see, they beat him pretty terribly,” Khazaeli said at the time. “He’s got bruises all across his body. This is for the offense of asking why they handcuffed his husband.”

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment this afternoon.

However, KSDK reported this evening that police have shared some body cam footage with several city officials and that it “appears to corroborate the police version of the story," though they acknowledge "pressing" unanswered questions. KSDK reports that the video shows Morris “shove” the officer in the gangway — but that the video is too dark to show much more. On the video, they say, Morris can be heard asking an officer why he hit him.

This is not the first time that the officer identified as R.W. has faced allegations of wrongdoing, court records show. 

According to a lawsuit filed in 2021, the officer threw a 52-year-old man down to the ground while that man was handcuffed, causing multiple broken bones. 

That man was Charles Singleton, and he alleges the incident took place around 2:30 a.m. on September 21, 2019, at an apartment complex on South Broadway, just a four minute drive from Bar:PM.

According to Singleton's lawsuit, police officers — including R.W. — were at the apartment complex to respond to an alleged assault. A number of people were arrested and several police cars were on the scene. Singleton was not among those being taken into custody, at least not at first. 

The suit says that Singleton was in a crowd of onlookers at the scene. According to the police reports, Singleton said, "Fuck the police."

As a result of those comments, the officer placed Singleton under arrest for "disturbing the peace."

According to the police report stemming from the incident, although Singleton had been put in handcuffs, he still had his cell phone in his hand. The officer attempted to take it from him. A struggle ensued and, according to Singleton's lawsuit, "Without justification or legal cause, [R.W.] threw [Singleton] to the concrete ground face first while [his] hands were secured behind his body." 

The tripping maneuver shattered multiple bones, including in Singleton's clavicle and left proximal tibia and fibula — bones in his knee as well as his collarbone. 

Singleton's attorney, Stokes, recognized the officer from deposing him for Singleton’s lawsuit. He says that, based on what he knows about what occurred at Bar:PM earlier this week, the officer seems to have an M.O. of responding with physical aggression when others challenge him with their words.

"Singleton gets picked up for telling the police to go away, and ends up with four days in the hospital," Stokes says. 

Khazaeli adds, "If this is the same officer, he needs to be retrained on what a public disturbance is and when he can seize and use force against a bystander."

In the Bar:PM incident, videotape captured someone asking the police officers who crashed into the building “who was sucking whose dick” at the time of the crash. But attorney Dave Roland, who handles many First Amendment cases, says such coarse language would not give police grounds for an arrest, much less violence.

He says it's been very well established in case law that there can be "clearly inflammatory language directed at officers and you still can't punish somebody because they say something that you don't like." That sort of language comes with the territory of being an officer, says Roland. 

Roland adds, "If that was said and there was nothing else to warrant arresting the bar owner, I think that's a pretty clear cut First Amendment violation."