Another case of death by police beatings, this time in Bakersfield California, has the community in an outrage! On May 8th, Kern Country officers beat an inebriated David Silva for so long and so hard that the man eventually passed out and later died from baton hits to his head.
Various witness accounts recall that the officers were violently beating the man as he lay in the street and continued to beat him even after he went silent and seemed unresponsive. His bleeding body was then left in the street for a rather prolonged period of time until the ambulance came, but by then any CPR that the paramedics attempted was redundant, because Silva was already dead.
A 911 call from a distressed witness, Selena, said that officers were beating a man to death.“There’s a man laying on the floor, and your police officers beat the (expletive) out of him and killed him,” said Selena, according to reports. She also insists that the man did nothing to deserve such harsh treatment.
A young man, Ruben Ceballos, was woken from his sleep by the screams and loud noises of the police beating Silva. When he looked outside to see what was happening, Ceballos also claimed that the police officers were brutally beating on the man and after several minutes, the beaten man stopped screaming and seemed unresponsive. Ceballos, too, says that the Silva did nothing to provoke such aggression from the officers.
Thanks to modern and compact technology, most cell phones nowadays have built-in video recorders and it is most likely certain that at least a few of the witnesses had recorded the attack on their cellphones. The officers musty have also assumed the same thing, since after the beating they went around interrogating and intimidating the witnesses, in some cases even confiscating their cell phones. Melissa Quair, another witness at the scene said that the officers not only harassed the witnesses, but searched some of their homes as well, in order to try and recover any of the video footage of the actual beating.
The officers’ apparent hostile demeanor toward the witnesses is even more apparent when they arrested a witness, Jason Land, who spoke out against what he saw the officers doing to Silva. The police claim that Land was arrested for violating his probation, was high on PCP and arrested him without any proof.
David Silva’s brother Christopher is enraged and claims that his brother was murdered and that he wants justice for what the officers did to his brother. Christopher wants to see the body of his brother and wants the confiscated video “evidence” to be released to the public. Christopher was quoted as saying “My brother spent the last eight minutes of his life pleading, begging for his life. The true evidence is in those phone witnesses that apparently the sheriff deputies already took. But I know the truth will come out and my brother’s voice will be heard.”