Joshua Smith, who works for Florissant, Missouri, the Police Department, faces indictments of first and fourth level offenses and armed criminal acts, St. Charles District Attorney Tim Lohmar said Wednesday.
The accusation was filed after a review of footage from a citizen surveillance camera recorded on June 2, prosecutors said. Smith was fired June 10.
“When the vehicle aimed the headlights at the victim, it became a 4,000 pound missile,” Lohmar told reporters.
Smith’s lawyer, Scott Rosenblum, told CNN that the video was a small part of the meeting “and failed to tell the whole story” of the incident, which he called an accident “in exceptional circumstances.”
The officer was involved in chasing a vehicle.
“We have a situation where the driver, after taking off, jumps from a moving vehicle – allowing the vehicle to continue empty,” Rosenblum wrote in an email. “Unexpectedly the injured man also jumped from the car. Mr. Smith never intended to hit him. Nor did other residents expect to jump in front of him from a moving car.”
The video from the scene shows the man got hit as he ran from the car while slowly rolling on the road.
This fourth-degree attack began with a former officer who kicked the victim while he was on the ground, already suffering from a broken ankle, Lohmar said.
A statement of possible causes said Smith also hit the man before handcuffing him.
“It’s shocking, to say the least,” Lohmar said from the video.
Jerryl Christmas, a lawyer for the unknown injured man, told CNN affiliate KMOV that his client “suffered a serious injury that required surgery and remained traumatized by this shocking incident.”
Smith, who had been with the Florissant police for nine years before he was fired last week after the release of the previous video, had carried out security details for “looting and vandalism” following anti-racism protests in the area, Lohmar said.
Smith, 31, and two other police officers in the SUV followed a car that matched the description of the car involved in the “shot fired” incident from a few days earlier, Lohmar said.
The car did not immediately pull over when Smith turned on sirens and unmarked Ford Explorer lights, officials said. Finally, it stopped in a residential area, when the inhabitants came out and ran, Lohmar said. The victim is one of the three, according to Lohmar, he said.
Florissant is in the north of St. Louis and close to Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown died in a confrontation with police in 2014 that gave impetus to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Gregory Lemos from CNN contributed to this report.
