Dover businessman Ron Robinson recalled Wednesday that he had just gotten out of the shower and was getting ready for bed on the night of Sept. 13, 2011, when he heard a woman screaming outside.
He peeked through a window to see police cars and blue lights flashing, and thought, "Well, somebody's getting in trouble for something."
"I went to lay down in the bed," he told a federal jury Wednesday, "but I heard more hollering. Then I recognized my wife's voice saying, 'Ron Robinson, help! Ron Robinson, come!'"
Robinson said his wife, Eva Robinson, had just gone out to walk their miniature schnauzer, Jack, after the family returned home from his parents' house. He said his son, Matthew, had gone out to join his mother on her walk. It was a little after 9 p.m.
As he ran across the crosswalk toward his son, Robinson said, one of the officers shouted at him, "Get back! Get down!" He said he fell to his knees as the officer rushed toward him and put a hand on his shoulder to keep him down. That's when, he recalled, he saw that his son's hands were cuffed behind his back and that his face was "bloody and dirty."
Matthew Robinson, then 16, yelled to his father that police had used a Taser on him twice and that his mother was being held, Robinson recalled. He said he identified himself as the boy's father and the woman's husband, and he demanded to know what was going on. He said one of three officers present, a state trooper, told him, "You may not believe me, sir, but your son's got drug paraphernalia."
Testifying as one of the final plaintiffs' witnesses in a federal trial over the family's civil-rights lawsuit against the other two lawmen -- Dover police officer Steven Payton and Pope County sheriff's office Sgt. Kristopher Stevens -- the father said he told the trooper, "Not my son."
Later, after the lawmen placed the mother and son in the back seat of Payton's police car for transport to jail, Ron Robinson said he asked Payton, who had been examining the contents of his son's wallet, "What are you calling drug paraphernalia?"
"Payton shows me an air blower, about this long, that we use in the shop," said Robinson, holding his fingers about 5 inches apart. "I said, 'No, that's Matthew's air blower from the shop, right here across the street," pointing to his auto body shop.
The anxious father said he told Payton, "You call Rod Pfeifer. He'll straighten this out in just a minute."
Pfeifer was the town's police chief, a position known in Dover as the town marshal, and had been a close friend of the elder Robinson for about 40 years. Examining the item from the witness stand, Robinson said, "Actually, that was Rod Pfeifer's air blower from when he worked at the shop."
Pfeifer, who retired from the marshal's job about a year ago, had been a "body man" like Robinson, the father explained. He said they both worked in a shop together in the 1980s and then, before Pfeifer became the town marshal, he worked in Robinson's shop.
Robinson testified that Payton refused to call Pfeifer but let Robinson go home, where his 12-year-old daughter, Sara, was sleeping, to get his phone. Robinson said he couldn't reach Pfeifer by phone, so he went to his nearby home and told him what happened. He said Pfeifer promised to make some calls as Robinson headed to the jail to get his wife.
Robinson complained that the officers have never been punished for their actions, which the family contends amounted to police brutality and left Matthew Robinson, now 20, with an infected sore near his tailbone that took three surgeries to fix.
Payton, now a Pope County sheriff's deputy, testified later that after he drove past the mother and son, not knowing their relationship, he was concerned about what appeared to be a large man approaching a small woman. He then thought Matthew Robinson acted suspiciously in staring at him with a "furrowed brow," appearing to put something into his pocket, and picking something up off the ground and throwing it -- a rock, Matthew Robinson has said.
Pat James, the family's attorney, asked Payton why he didn't simply leave the mother and son alone after talking to them and realizing they were family members.
"Both had already committed disorderly conduct," Payton replied.
He said both people had instantly become defensive when he got out of his patrol car, yelling that they did nothing wrong and refusing to identify themselves, before Eva Robinson told the officer that Matthew Robinson was her son.
"Their yelling and screaming at that noise level was disorderly conduct," said Payton, explaining why he summoned two backup officers and detained the Robinsons.
The family contends it was Stevens who used a Taser on Matthew Robinson repeatedly, perhaps six times, after the officers ordered the boy to get out of Payton's car and his size-16 shoe -- stuck under the front seat -- didn't allow him to immediately comply.
"Would you stop everybody who has a furrowed eyebrow that had a hand in their pocket?" James asked Payton.
"I would, yes," Payton replied, adding, "If everything was the same again, I would do those things again, yes sir."
Payton acknowledged that one of the reasons he stopped and questioned the two was he thought Matthew Robinson "might have drugs in his pocket."
"So you stopped to make a warrantless search?" James asked.
"I wasn't searching him," Payton replied.
Payton is expected to remain on the witness stand when the trial resumes at 8:30 a.m. today in the Little Rock courtroom of Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller.
Metro on 10/01/2015