Brooklyn Cops Beat Young Restaurant Worker: Video

Screenshot via El Grito De Sunset Park

The vigilant cop-watch community in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, has released video allegedly showing NYPD Officer Elvis Merizalde and other officers tackling and beating a local restaurant worker — then trying to tamper with surveillance footage of the incident.

“I’m 100 percent sure it’s [Officer Merizalde],” Dennis Flores, leader of the police-accountability group El Grito De Sunset Park, told Patch. “I’ve reported so many videos of him that at this point, I could even spot him by the way he walks.”

On the evening of Saturday, Nov. 21, 18-year-old Sunset Park resident Kevin Cuzco was wrangled to the floor and beaten by multiple officers during a shift at his family’s Fifth Avenue restaurant, El Tesoro Ecuatoriano.

Video of the violent arrest was captured by the restaurant’s surveillance cameras, and is included in the following news report.

The cops were called to El Tesoro Ecuatoriano that night to break up a fight between patrons, Cuzco recalled in an interview with PIX11.

“As soon as the cops came, they arrested two guys, and they were beating one of the guys down,” Cuzco said. “I stood up for that guy… . I said, ‘Don’t touch him.’ I said, ‘That’s not right.’ And a no-uniform cop came and pushed me.”

Once Cuzco had been pushed back inside the restaurant, one of the officers can be seen on video slamming him to the floor.

“I did not put my hands on him — nothing,” Cuzco said. “He slammed me to the floor. And from there, he hit me in my head with a flapjack, and he started also hitting me in my gut.”

Cuzco said he spent 24 hours in jail before the charges against him were dropped.

“They put four staples in my head. That’s one injury,” he said. “I have a busted lip. That’s two. Right here they hit me — an injured ear, or the side of my ear.”

Additional footage released by El Grito De Sunset Park (and embedded below) shows a group of officers returning to the restaurant and gathering around the control hub for its surveillance system.

According to Flores, the reason officers weren’t able to retrieve the controversial footage is that “the business owners themselves don’t know the passwords” to unlock the system.

The NYPD would not explain why the officers could be seen on camera returning to the restaurant.

”The matter is under internal review,” the department’s press office told Patch via email.

When pressed for additional information on the incident, including Officer Merizalde’s involvement and the rationale for Cuzco’s arrest, an NYPD spokesman said no details could be discussed until the internal investigation had concluded.

Officer Merizalde has been named in five different civil-rights lawsuits filed against police officers in federal court since 2007.

The lawsuits include one filed by 17-year-old Enrique Del Rosario after police split his head open during the 2014 Puerto Rican Day parade in Sunset Park, also on Fifth Avenue.

In addition, community members have identified Merizalde as one of the officers involved in the brutal assault on a pregnant woman in September 2014 — again, along Fifth Avenue. (Merizalde is said to have broken Sunset Park resident Secundino Payamps’ elbow as he tried to help his wife, the pregnant woman’s friend, up from the pavement.)

“I was here when the pregnant lady got pushed. It was literally out here,” Cuzco, the young restaurant worker beaten by cops on Nov. 21, said in his interview with PIX11, gesturing out the front door.

“It’s kind of ridiculous that the officers keep repeating this kind of behavior” and escaping punishment, Flores told Patch.

“This is something that is happening across the country,” he said. “The difference is that in Sunset Park, we’re very active with cop-watching. We’re able to connect the dots, incident by incident, because we’ve done this for over a decade.”