Chris LeDay 1
Chris LeDay didn't film the footage of 37 year-old Alton Sterling being executed by heavily armed law enforcement agents in Baton Rogue, Louisiana. LeDay, who lives in Georgia learned of Sterling's death at the hands of police and that the officer's body cameras suspiciously fell off rendering no video of the killing. The incident was causing unrest but just locally. That would soon change. There luckily was video and once LeDay got a hold of it, he told himself that he was going to try to make it go viral, hoping that it'd push people to act. LeDay succeeded. Shortly after his intial posts, Shaun King, the senior justice writer at the New York Daily News began circulating the video to his hundreds of thousands of followers. The horrific video of a police officer shooting Sterling point blank in the chest and then several more times quickly went viral.
Chris LeDay went to work the next day at Dobbins Air Reserve Base where he works as an aerospace ground equipment technician. As LeDay passed through the security checkpoint several military police officers, some carrying M-16 rifles, arrested him on suspicion of assault and battery. LeDay was eventually told that he was being held for not paying parking tickets totaling around $1,000. After paying the fines LeDay was released but not before spending 26 hours behind bars. Chris LeDay is saying the arrest was retaliation for posting the video of Alton Sterling's killing and his efforts in helping make it go viral.
The unrest following the deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement and the killing of police officers in Dallas has led to The Bahamas, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain to issue warnings to its citizen traveling to the U.S.
The story was originally reported at Photography Is Not a Crime.
