“She tapped a police officer’s bike, apparently, so now they’re saying she assaulted a police officer.”

A Seattle mother was arrested Friday for allegedly slowly reversing her car into a group of police officers on bicycles as she live-streamed herself on Instagram at a demonstration on Monday night.
Laura Eberhard, 32, appeared in court on Saturday for a preliminary hearing, charged with two counts of third-degree assault and criminal mischief.
She was released on her own recognizance on the condition she reappear at future hearings and not possess any weapons, according to Casey McNerthney, a spokesperson for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
Video of Eberhards arrest went viral on Saturday and was seen over 1.5 million times on Twitter. The footage shows her shouting, Im not resisting, Im not resisting, before she tells bystanders her name and provides contact information for her aunt.
An officer then says, Youre under arrest for assault multiple counts against police officers. You assaulted me and you assaulted another police officer.
Before Eberhard was arrested, she had been preparing to go grocery shopping with her son and fiancé, according to her aunt, Rebecca McKee, when a vehicle suddenly blocked her in the driveway. “Then, like 20-30 cops came and surrounded them and started yanking her out of the car in front of her 9-year-old child,” McKee said.
Eberhard herself recorded a video of the incident on Monday, in which her car is moving very slowly when police allege it came in contact with the officers.
“And she tapped a police officers bike, apparently, so now theyre saying she assaulted a police officer,” McKee said. “But in the video, you can clearly see she wasnt screaming at the police, she wasnt being violent, and she probably didnt even know shed hit the cops, otherwise she would have said something.”
According to a criminal complaint, Eberhard was identified due to police body cam footage that captured her license plate as well as stickers on the vehicle.
She allegedly struck an officer named Winngham with significant force which he said left him with ongoing back pain. Eberhards video shows her apparently moving at a low rate of speed.
As officers approached we were moving behind the rear of the vehicle, Winningham said in an official statement in the complaint. I then saw the white reverse lights come on and the vehicle began backing up as officers approached. The vehicle appeared to be trying to hit officers and prevent them from being able to move past. The vehicle backed into me and struck me.
The investigating detective said two other officers also felt the driver was intending to hit them. The only reason they did not stop to arrest her, they told the detective, was because they had been ordered to establish a line elsewhere in the protests.
The detective said the body cam footage showed the driver could have moved forward to avoid the officers. Initially it appeared as if the driver might have been trying to block the Officers movement, but after several of them had already ridden past, the car continued to go backwards, directly into the line of bicycles.
The detectives also used as evidence a Facebook post from Eberhards page earlier that same day showing a Star Wars-inspired cartoon showing a Jedi having run over Storm Troopers using a Landspeeder. This machine kills fascists, reads a message on the vehicle. The top of the cartoon features the letters ACAB, an acronym meaning All Cops Are Bastards.
Eberhard recorded the incident herself during a livestream of herself at the protests on Monday night that she posted to Instagram. In the 45-minute video, she can be seen driving around to different locations as she yells Fuck the police!
I am not here to play fucking games with the police. Come at me, bruh. I will fuck you up, she says at one point. Not really though because Im not volatile like them. I have no need. I dont have a tiny penis.
When she arrives at the scene, she speaks to an unidentified woman protester who asks her to create a perimeter with her car as the police approach.
Ill be in the line of fire, Eberhard says. I cant help where my car was parked!
Watch out. Im going to create a perimeter, she says. Here they come.
She then angles her cellphone at the window to record herself reversing slowly as more than a dozen officers cycle between her and the curb. As she reverses, at least two officers appear to be pushed on to the curb but they keep cycling.
Im trying to stop police from hurting private citizens and Im putting myself at risk of going to jail for that, she says minutes later in the video. Thats just so insane to me. All I want to do is stop the police from hurting people.
Theres a fucking war going on at Cal Anderson Park, she says.
Eberhard made her Instagram profile private after she was contacted by BuzzFeed News multiple times for comment, to which she did not respond.
Mckee, Eberhards aunt, said her niece had gone to the protest in order to help administer first aid and left when police began shooting rubber bullets, offering to drive injured protesters to the hospital.
“It wasnt an intentional thing,” she added. “They arrested her for a bunch of bullshit.”
According to the criminal complaint, detectives opted to arrest Eberhard on Friday because they spotted her child in the car and they did not want her to be on the road with the child when they tried to arrest her. When they did, police claimed there was a struggle and they eventually used pepper spray.
The detective wrote in the complaint that he heard one of the officers tell Eberhard and the crowd of bystanders watching her arrest that she was being taken into custody for an assault on police officers a few days earlier.
Eberhard responded to this by yelling in the direction of the crowd, I was only trying to save lives! the detective wrote.
Asked why the police officer Eberhard allegedly hit appeared to be the same officer who arrested her based on his statement to her that You assaulted me and you assaulted another police officer Detective Mark Jamieson, a spokesperson for the Seattle police, BuzzFeed News he believed the officer happened to be in the same vicinity.
Asked if it was normal for an injured officer to personally arrest the suspect who injured them, Jamieson replied, Is it normal? Were not really in normal times right now.