COLUMBIA, S.C. — Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott was clear about why he fired a sheriff’s deputy Wednesday for flinging a student across a high school classroom after she refused multiple orders to leave class for using her cellphone.
“Ben Fields did wrong this past Monday,” Lott said at a news conference.
But the sheriff wasn’t done spreading the blame. He said of the defiant student: “She started this.”
The firing of Fields is not the end of a rolling debate over who bears the brunt of the blame for the school disciplinary encounter, which also has brought into question ongoing concerns about the role of police in schools.
Students at Spring Valley High School had filmed Senior Deputy Fields putting their classmate in a headlock, flipping her desk over and tossing her across the floor.
An attorney for the still-unidentified student, Todd Rutherford, told “Good Morning America” on Wednesday morning that the girl had a cast on her arm, neck and back injuries, and a rug burn on her forehead because of Fields’ aggressive treatment.
As the FBI launches a civil rights investigation into whether Fields broke any laws, the deputy denied wrongdoing in a statement from his attorney.
“We believe that Mr. Fields’ actions were carried out professionally and that he was performing his job duties within the legal threshold,” wrote his attorney, Scott J. Hayes, who noted that the positive support received for Fields’ actions had been “overwhelming.”
Among parents and students at the school, reviews were mixed. The deputy is white and the student is black, and outside the modern brick campus, some black and white parents who lined up in sedans and SUVs to pick their children up were unsure about whether the incident reflected a broader problem of race.
Still, Jackson agreed the student on Monday bore some responsibility. “If she hadn’t caused the classroom disruption, this might not have happened,” he said.
Lott, the sheriff, has said that deputies in schools receive higher levels of training and that Fields was up to date on his requirements.
But there have also been multiple allegations of wrongdoing in the past against Fields.
Lott said a number of complaints had been filed against him over the years and that “a number of them have been sustained” and many had not. He did not give further details and did not release Fields’ personnel file Wednesday.
Fields had been sued at least three times in the past 10 years, with all three lawsuits accusing of Fields acting aggressively or wrongly implicating innocent people.