Queer activist faces surgery after being shot in the face by police during Black Lives Matter protest
Tee Fansofa was shot, they claimed, twice with rubber bullets and once with a tear gas canister by Sacramento Police Department officers. (Screen captures via CBS)
A queer Black Lives Matter protester said police shot two rubber bullets which fractured their skull in an instant.
Cops lobbed a tear gas canister which they said also crashed into their cheek, pockmarking it with a bloated, purple scar.
These injuries will force Fansofa to undergo facial surgery.
They suffered them after Sacramento Police Department Officers confronted protesters, resorting to violent tactics to disperse the crowds.
Fansofa said they were in midtown Sacramento on May 30 when officer fired two rubber bullets and lobbed a gas canister at them.
Video shows police shooting at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters.
“I was hit in the face three times, with a tear gas canister and two rubber bullets,” Fansofa said in a YouTube video posted to a GoFundMe page.
“I mean, I am very lucky to be alive.”
CBS Sacramento reported California’s capital city saw police pummel protesters with increasingly brutal ways to squash Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Video footage obtained by the outlet filmed by Lynz Williams shows a harried scene of cops stuffing into the streets, shooting at peaceful protesters.
“What are you shooting for, what are you shooting?” an embittered Williams screams, her voice strained.
“You’re shooting at peaceful protesters, not even looters!”
A protester stands face to face with a police officer during a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020. (Stanton Sharpe/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
She rushed to Fansofa’s side after they were shot.
“At that point, I saw about three or four people and grab Tee and just drag a limp body out of eyeshot,” Williams said.
“You had people who were being innocent bystanders, and wanting to be witness to what was taking place here, standing on the sidewalk thinking that they were safe and then police started aiming at the people on the sidewalk.”
A Sacramento Police Department spokesperson claimed to have no record of Fansofa’s injury. Moreover, they said, any such use of force would be reviewed per department policy.
Sacramento has a storied history of police brutality.
Sacramento has always been a city on edge.
In 2018, two police officers shot Stephon Clark, an unarmed 22-year-old Black man, eight times in the back in his grandmother’s backyard. The incident has long cast a spectre of police violence on they city.
A Black Lives Matter protester holds an illustration of Stephon Clark during a march on April 4, 2018 in Sacramento, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Protests stirred then as they are now, with activists from the Black Lives Matter movement marching through downtown Sacramento. They voiced outrage at racially discriminatory policing and city leaders allowing the force to do so with impunity.
The officers never faced charges despite pleas from Black community leaders for accountability.
Escalating unrest in the city reignited by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 was only hushed by the words Stephon’s brother, Stevante Clark, who urged Black Lives Matter protesters to stay peaceful, the Sacramento Bee reported.
Officials of the state capital stretched curfew orders throughout to this weekend
