South Carolina officer fired, new video shows student punching him in the face

A new video has surfaced following the altercation between a South Carolina student and a school police monitor showing the student repeatedly punching the officer in the face as he was trying to remove her from the classroom. 
 
After a video captured on a student cellphone in a South Carolina High School on Monday showed a violent exchange between a student and the officer, outrage broke out on social media criticizing the officer’s use of force.
 

This new video, described by Sheriff Leon Lott as the “third video” will play a part in the internal affairs investigation into whether Senior Deputy Ben Fields violated policy in Monday’s incident at Spring Valley High School in Columbia.
 
After the first video surfaced, Fields was placed on administrative leave. He was then fired on Wednesday with the sheriff saying he did not follow proper procedures and training.

There are at least three videos that have surfaced of the incident — which shows the girl flailing at the officer as he is already in the middle of flipping her chair over.

Deputy Ben Fields was told of his firing late Wednesday morning, Sheriff Leon Lott said. Fields had been a school resource officer at Spring Valley High School.

The student was being disruptive and refused to leave the classroom despite being told by a teacher and administrator to do so, Lott said, and that’s when Fields was brought in Monday to remove her from the class. She again refused, and Fields told her she was under arrest, Lott said.

She continued to refuse, and at that point the video shows the deputy flipping the teen backward and then throwing her across the room. At that point, Lott said, Fields did not use proper procedure.

Calls for Fields to be fired began mounting almost immediately after the video surfaced, and the FBI began a civil rights investigation at Lott’s request. The confrontation was captured on cellphones by students, one of whom said it all started when the girl pulled out her cellphone and refused her math teacher’s attempt to take it away during class.

– With files from the Associated Press