The Texas pool party where a police officer pinned a screaming teenaged girl to the ground and pointed his pistol at others might have escaped notice if not for Brandon Brooks.
Brooks, 15, filmed roughly seven minutes of the melee. His video has gone viral and prompted calls to fire the McKinney police officer seen in the video. The officer, Cpl. Eric Casebolt, a 10-year department veteran, has been placed on administrative leave during the investigation, according to police.
"When he pulled his gun, my heart dropped," Brooks told NewsFix. "As soon as he pulled out his gun, I thought he was gonna shoot that kid. That was very scary."
Brooks described the pool party at the Craig Ranch North Community as an end-of-the-school-year gathering a classmate invited him to via Twitter.
After a pool security guard gave Brooks and his friends a hard time about being there, the teen said he went to the bathroom and was prepared to pack his belongings. A friend told him there was a fight outside, but it was over by the time Brooks got there.
"The parents immediately started yelling, 'You need more cops!'" Brooks said. "The fight was between a mom and girl -- which had nothing to do with all those other kids she apparently needed more cops for."
Brooks called the scene "out of control." He said Casebolt grew angry after he tripped chasing a group of teens he had told to sit down.
"He was going crazy, putting people in handcuffs, swinging them to the ground," Brooks said.
As other teens at the pool party have said, Brooks said he felt racism was involved.
"I was one of the only white people in the area when [the arrest] was happening," Brooks said. "You can see in part of the video where [an officer] tells people to sit down and kind of skips over me and tells my African-American friends to go sit down," Brooks said.
Brooks said it was "very uncalled for" for Casebolt to pin 15-year-old Dajerria Becton to the ground as she screamed for help. She was wearing a swimsuit at the time.
"All she was doing was talking to her friends about the situation. She was quote-unquote 'running her mouth' -- and I mean, she has freedom of speech," Brooks said.
Becton told Fox 4 that Casebolt told her to keep walking. "I’m guessing he thought we were saying rude stuff to him," Becton told the station. "He grabbed me and he like twisted my arm on the back of my back and he shoved me in the grass, he started pulling the back of my braids and I was like telling him that he can get off me because my back was hurting really bad."
Lashauna Burks, the adult supervising the party, told The Huffington Post Monday that white adults began yelling racist and profane remarks at the teens.
“This lady was saying racial slurs to some friends that came to the cookout. ... She was saying things such as, 'You black f****r,' and, ‘That's why you live in Section 8 homes,'" Burke's daughter, Tatiana Rhodes, told HuffPost.
Brooks, too, disputed that the teens started the chaos.
"The parents said that we were cursing at them and stuff, which that didn't happen at all," Brooks said. "They were giving us a hard time. I think personally it's because there are bunch of African-Americans in the neighborhood -- all who came to the pool on the same day. They probably thought they weren't from there or something."
Brooks told NewsFix he was particularly troubled by racist comments posted on his YouTube video.
"I think it's horrible," Brooks said. "They're going to discriminate against them just because they're black? What if that was your kid getting slung to the ground? Would you still be talk about them in the way that you are if that was your kid?"