Police Crash Car Into Gay Bar, Then Arrest Owner
The co-owner of a gay bar in St. Louis was arrested during an altercation with police after an officer crashed their car into the bar.
Chad Morris and James Pence, who own Bar:PM in the Carondelet neighborhood of St. Louis, were relaxing in their apartment above the bar on Monday when they heard a crash at around 12:30 a.m.
“I was actually already in bed [and] I heard a loud boom,” Pence told local NBC affiliate KSDK-TV. “I jumped up thinking it was an accident with a vehicle, and then, I saw it, and it was a St. Louis city police department vehicle in the front of our building.”
Pence approached the officer who had been driving the vehicle to ask what happened, and the officer, who has not been named by the department, reportedly told him, “I swerved to miss a dog.”
Surveillance video footage of the street, posted to social media by Pence and Morris’s lawyer, Javad Khazaeli, shows the police vehicle swerving left and crashing into the bar as it passes a parallel-parked vehicle on its right.
Sooo. You all heard about the cop car that slammed into Bar PM Sunday night. And they arrested the owner for having the audacity to question him. Well here’s the video. 1/ pic.twitter.com/O8EWa8v3uZ
— Javad Khazaeli (@javadesq) December 19, 2023
According to Khazaeli, he has video of Pence arriving on the scene and an officer approaching Pence and asking him if he’s the owner, to which Pence responds affirmatively.
The officer asked to see Pence’s ID, prompting Pence to say, “Why should I show my ID? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“He says it loudly, because he’s not happy,” Khazaeli told NBC News. “And an officer says, ‘You don’t get to yell at me. You’re under arrest for disturbing the peace.’ And then, when bystanders repeatedly asked the officer why was he arrested, he said, ‘Nobody gets to yell at me,’ which is not the standard for an arrest.”
Morris approached the scene and angrily asked why his husband was in handcuffs.
Pence later told KSDK-TV that he thought he heard a police officer make a homophobic remark towards Morris.
“My husband did put his hand on a cop out of defense because they had already put me in handcuffs.”
However, according to the New York Times, video shot by a bystander does not show Morris shoving or striking an officer. Rather, it shows Morris walking down an alleyway, followed by several officers.
What occurs in the alleyway cannot be seen on tape, but Morris eventually emerges from the alleyway in handcuffs, with his shirt tattered. He says in the video that an officer punched the “left side of my eye” before being placed in the back of a police van.
A photo of Morris taken just a day late shows Morris’s left eye bruised and swollen.
According to an incident report from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, an officer was driving too close to a parked car and overcorrected, losing control of the vehicle before crashing into the bar. The report claims an “offender” — who is not identified by name — came outside and “began shouting obscenities” at police officers following the crash.
When one of the officers “attempted to calm the situation,” the report claims, the offender shoved the officer. The officer claiming to have been shoved, John Pierce, accused Morris of striking him “in the chest with an open hand,” causing him to lose his balance. The report also claims Morris tried to strike Pierce “with a gate while fleeing from others.”
But Khazaeli, Morris’s lawyer, claims his client struck no one. Rather, he was beaten by an officer wearing a beanie hat.
Morris was charged with one count of third-degree assault and one count of resisting and interfering with an arrest. On Tuesday, he was released from jail, and the assault charge was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Christine Bertelson, a spokesperson for the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, confirmed to The Washington Post that the assault charge had been downgraded after prosecutors reviewed evidence in the case. But she did not say what that evidence was and declined to comment further.
Khazaeli says his client intends to dispute even the misdemeanor charge and raised the possibility of filing a civil lawsuit against the police department.
“Our goal is to have all of these charges dismissed because there’s no basis for them, and then to decide what kind of claims my clients have against these officers and to hold the officers accountable, because this just can’t stand,” Khazaeli told NBC News. “You can’t have police officers terrorizing people because they’re victims of a crime. And when they asked what happened, to be treated this way.”
Khazaeli later posted to X that the officer who beat Morris decided that the driver of the patrol car was not impaired, and therefore was not forced to take a breathalyzer to determine if he was intoxicated. He also said there was no dash cam footage from the car and that police won’t release the body camera footage.
Khazaeli posted additional video footage to X that he claims shows the police car running a red light just seconds before the collision.
Oh boy. Today, police announced that they did not give a breathalyzer exam to the St. Louis police officer who crashed into my clients bar bc other officers determined he was not impaired. Well here video of him running a red light seconds before he crashed into Bar:PM 1 pic.twitter.com/Xu79LIWlPO
— Javad Khazaeli (@javadesq) December 21, 2023
St. Louis Police Department spokesperson Lt. Col. Renee Kriesmann told reporters that the officer driving the vehicle had been distracted by his radio and lost control of the SUV. The SUV was going less than 40 miles per hour before the crash, and the officers involved were not given toxicology tests, as KSDK-TV reported.
Kriesmann told KSDK-TV that there are ongoing internal investigations into both the crash and the officers’ use of force when arresting Morris. She said the officers’ body camera footage would not be released because it is evidence in the criminal case against Morris.
Local community members have rallied around Bar:PM and its owners, with members of the Rudis Leather Society and other volunteers cleaning up the damage from the accident to allow the bar to reopen. On Tuesday, the bar was packed with customers, including some newcomers who wanted to show their support for Pence and Morris.
“They’ve never been here, but they’ve seen the story and they just wanted to come,” Morris told the Post.
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