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Spring Valley High School Arrest Video Goes Viral, FBI Investigation Sought After Ben Fields Throws Student To Ground

By Lindsay McCane
Published on: 02:16 PST, Oct 27, 2015

A Spring Valley High School arrest video has gone viral, leading the Richland County Sheriff’s office to request a FBI investigation.

In the video, the school resource officer, identified as Deputy Ben Fields, is seen forcibly removing a student from her desk, and then dragging her across the room. Now, according to USA Today, Sheriff Leon Lott has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Justice Department to conduct an investigation of the incident.

Lott said the sheriff’s office is in charge of the Spring Valley High School’s resource officer program, and he was at a law enforcement meeting in Chicago when the incident took place. He said he was very disturbed by what he saw take place in the video, and decided to cut his trip short to head back to Columbia, South Carolina.

“It’s very disturbing what happened (Monday),” said Lott. “It’s something I have to deal with and that’s what we’re going to be doing.”

Watch the disturbing video below.

The students in the classroom at the time of the incident said they were scared by what was going on. The student who recorded the incident Tony Robinson Jr. explained what happened leading up to the violent arrest.

Robinson said the girl in the video was working on her computer at approximately 10:30 a.m. and had her phone out at the same time. She was asked by her teacher to put her phone away, but she said no. An administrator was then called to the room and told her to get out of her seat.

“She really hadn’t done anything wrong,” Robinson said. “She said that she had took her phone out, but it was only for a quick second.”

After the girl refused to get out of her seat, resource officer Ben Fields entered the room, and again asked her if she would move. The girl still refused.

“When I saw what was about to happen my immediate first thing to think is let me get this on camera,” he said. “This is going to be something that not only I’m going to be like ‘wow did this really happened at my class,’ but just something that everybody else needs to see. This is something that we can’t let this just pass by.”

Fields then asked another student to move a desk, and he closed the girl’s computer and moved it to another desk. Robinson said that was when he knew something wasn’t right and he decided to get out his camera on his phone.

“He asked her again, ‘will you move, will you move.’ She said ‘no I have not done anything wrong.’ Then he said, ‘I’m going to treat you fairly.’ And she said ‘I don’t even know who you are.’ And that is where it started right there,” Robinson recalled.

Robinson said it didn’t take long for things to get physical, and he admitted that he was actually scared for his life.

“I’ve never seen anything so nasty looking, so sick to the point that you know, other students are turning away, don’t know what to do, and are just scared for their lives,” Robinson said. “That’s supposed to be somebody that’s going to protect us. Not somebody that we need to be scared of, or afraid. That was wrong. There was no justifiable reason for why he did that to that girl.”

Ben Fields is a deputy at the sheriff’s office and has been placed on administrative leave while the investigation is taking place. The girl was charged with disturbing schools and was later released to her parents.

What do you think of the viral Spring Valley High School arrest video? Leave your comments below.

[Photo via Twitter]

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