Standing Rock activist faces prison after officer shot him in the face
Will Parrish
@willparrishca
Thu 4 Oct 2018 04.00 EDT
Marcus Mitchell, who was severely injured when a bean bag pellet entered his eye socket, was charged with trespassing after protest
Warning: this article contains graphic images
Marcus Mitchell lay facedown on the snowy North Dakota prairie, blood pouring through the gaping wound on the left side of his face. It was just past midnight on 19 January 2017, and a Morton county sheriff’s deputy had just shot the 21-year-old indigenous activist with a bean bag pellet amid a demonstration near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation against the Dakota Access pipeline. The lead pellet entered Mitchell’s left eye socket, shattering the orbital wall of his eye and his cheekbone, and ripping open a flap of skin nearly to his left ear.
Paramedics brought Mitchell to the Sanford medical center in Bismarck, North Dakota, where hospital personnel removed the lead pellet from his face. But the harrowing ordeal was only beginning.
Law enforcement officers and hospital staff concealed Mitchell’s whereabouts from family members and supporters, who spent a frantic day and a half searching for him, multiple witnesses say. When a group of family members and legal workers finally discovered him on the hospital’s fourth floor, he was shackled to a gurney.
More than 18 months later, Mitchell, who is Dine’ (Navajo), is being prosecuted in relation to the incident, even as the police officers involved appear to have faced no repercussions. He faces class A misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and obstruction of a government function, which carry a collective maximum sentence of two years in prison and a $6,000 fine. His trial is scheduled for 8 November in Mandan, North Dakota.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/04/standing-rock-marcus-mitchell-shooting-charges
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