White "performed a factory reset that erased all data"
Mulberry, AR — Utterly shocking footage was posted to social media, subsequently leading to a storm of controversy and a swift response by officials. The video was so damning that it led to two Crawford County Sheriff's deputies being suspended and a Mulberry police officer being placed on leave last summer.
The investigation is now at a standstill as the primary officer involved is accused of deleting evidence from his department-issued iPhone.
According to police, they were investigating an incident of a man threatening an employee at a gas station in Mulberry. Police claim that when they responded, the suspect Randall Worcester, 27, punched a deputy, resulting in the horrifying display of police brutality in the video below.
Deputy Levi White dished out the majority of the blows.
White is now the subject of an FBI investigation and stands accused of deleting incriminating evidence by performing a factory reset on his work-issued iPhone, according to an affidavit.
White "performed a factory reset that erased all data" on his department-issued iPhone after the arrest, around an hour and a half before department members arrived to claim it, two weeks after the incident.
"As a result, the FBI analyst was not able to retrieve any data from the phone, including call records, text messages, pictures, or any other information that may have been relevant to the federal investigation," read the affidavit.
White claims that he reset the phone to remove stored personal information, but records recovered by the FBI from White's personal phone showed texts "that indicate White and other officers recognized that White used excessive force," according to the affidavit.
He is alleged to have received a text from Riddle that described the incident as an "ass whipping."
When the video begins, Worcester is under White, Zachary King, who also hit Worcester, and Thell Riddle. As the officer in the middle pins down his body, the ones on his head and feet unleash a fury of punches and knee strikes. Worcester is punched more than a dozen times in his face as his head bounces off the concrete.
As Worcester stops squirming, the White then grabs his head and repeatedly smashes it into the concrete. At this point, the woman filming had enough and was compelled to get out of the car and ask the officers to stop.
When she asks them to stop, one of the officers demands she gets back in the car and stops filming. The video then ends. The woman who posted the video on TikTok says it was her sister who filmed the incident. She said Worcester was talking with the police before they attacked him.
According to police, Worcester was hospitalized after the incident but has since been transported to jail where he was hit with a laundry list of charges relating to the stop. Last month, White and King were indicted on federal excessive force charges, and face up to a decade in prison.
Worcester was jailed on complaints of second-degree burglary, resisting arrest, refusal to submit, possessing an instrument of crime, criminal trespass, criminal mischief, terroristic threatening, and second-degree assault, according to Arkansas state police.
Illustrating the video's severity is that both departments immediately responded by suspending the officers involved. The governor of Arkansas even felt obligated to respond.
Below is that video.
