Oakland Cops Hospitalize Second Iraq Veteran

If the Oakland police department is trying to improve its public image regarding crowd control, it might want to try a little harder.

A second war veteran was sent to the hospital last week during clashes between police, Occupy movement protesters and vandals which resulted in more arrests.

Kayvan Sabehgi, 32, a local business owner who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan in as a U.S. Army Ranger, tells The Guardian, he was participating peacefully in a protest Wednesday before a verbal altercation with cops turned into a brutal beating.

From The Guardian:

"On Wednesday night, police used teargas and non-lethal projectiles to drive back protesters following an attempt by the Occupy supporters to shut down the city of Oakland.

Sabehgi told the Guardian from hospital he was walking alone along 14th Street in central Oakland – away from the main area of clashes – when he was injured.

'There was a group of police in front of me,' he told the Guardian from his hospital bed. 'They told me to move, but I was like: 'Move to where?' There was nowhere to move."

Then Sabehgi says police hit him repeatedly with batons, cuffed him and threw him into a van. The veteran was arrested and says despite repeated requests for real medical attention, police prevented him from getting any until 18 hours later, when an ambulance was called because he couldn’t leave his cell on his own after posting bail. He reportedly went into surgery Friday for a lacerated spleen and other internal bleeding.

Sabehgi’s story is the second detailing an incident of police wounding an Iraq war veteran during the Occupy Oakland protests, which have seen some of the most violent clashes between police and participants. On October 25, Marine and Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen suffered a fractured skull after police apparently shot a tear gas canister into him at close range. Olsen was participating in the protests peacefully, according to group Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Local television station KTVU interviewed a friend of Sabehgi who said that the business owner wasn’t part of a splinter group of protesters committing vandalism in the city on Wednesday.

“Under no circumstances would he do that,” Richard Collins told KTVU. “He’s a business owner and he wouldn’t harm someone else’s business. He was just out there speaking his mind.”

Interim Police Chief Howard Jordan tells KTVU that he has asked two investigators to look into the incident.