The woman who was pinned to the floor and tased by police officers in a January incident outside a Miami strip club is speaking out about the ordeal after criminal charges were brought against the officer responsible.
“I was just humiliated, embarrassed, I was scared for my life,” said Safiya Satchell, who was trying to leave Tootsie's Cabaret on January 14th when Jordy Yanes Martel, then an officer with the Miami Gardens police department, demanded she get out of the car to receive a trespassing warning.
He proceeded to drag Satchell out of her car, place his knee on her neck and tase her twice in the stomach while she had her arms restrained. He also misrepresented the incident later in his affidavit, which resulted in him being charged two counts of official misconduct and four counts of battery by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement last week.
“At that moment I don’t know if I was being shot or tased,” said Satchell. “He was holding me down, the other officer was holding me down so at that moment I didn’t know what was going on, all I could do is just scream.”
Satchell told NBC 6 she walked out of the club after a dispute with staff over food, and was trying to drive out when a security guard blocked her car.
30-year-old Yanes Martel was working off-duty security at the club that night, and the club's manager had asked him to give Satchell a verbal warning after he claimed she had thrown money at a waiter.
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By the time state attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle brought criminal charges against Martel in July, he had already been fired from the Miami Gardens police department.
“We are all here today to correct what we all see as an injustice,” said Fernandez Rundle at a press conference last week, where she presented two videos as evidence of Martel's wrongdoings and went into thorough detail about all the false claims he'd made in his affidavit.
Satchell says she has seen the video, but won't watch it again. "I still feel violated, I have extreme anxiety," she told NBC 6.
“I hate going places where I feel as though there’s going to be police presence.”
