Officer Marc Laue was seething.
Minutes earlier, while patrolling the hallways of Judson High School in Converse, Texas, he had confronted a 15-year-old accused of pushing an assistant principal. The teenager, Jeremiah Johnson, cursed at the officer and walked away.
Officer Laue grabbed repeatedly at Jeremiah’s arms and backpack, body camera footage of the encounter shows. When the boy pushed away, the officer wrapped his arms around him and took him to the floor.
Now Jeremiah was handcuffed in the school’s cramped police office. As another officer tried to lower Jeremiah into a chair, Officer Laue rammed his fists into the boy’s belly.
“Sit the fuck down!” Officer Laue shouted.
Since 2022, when a gunman killed 21 people at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has spent billions of dollars installing police officers at public schools. Under state law, officers are supposed to stay out of “routine student discipline.” But over the past few years, they have used physical force in thousands of cases, including to stop seemingly minor misbehavior.
The incident at Judson High offers an extraordinary glimpse into a confrontation gone wrong. What makes it so unusual is that the student and the officer, as well as a teacher, discussed it with a reporter. The 33-minute episode, from November 2023, was also captured on body camera footage, which was reviewed by The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News.
The case underscores a concern that has been raised by parents and advocates since schools began stationing law enforcement on their campuses: that officers might clash with vulnerable students, derailing their lives.
Ian Adams, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who reviewed the footage for The Times and The Express-News, called it “horrific.” The way Officer Laue shoved his fists into Jeremiah, Mr. Adams said, went beyond the bounds of “normal policing.”
As Jeremiah folded into the chair, he gasped. “I can’t even breathe,” he said.
Officer Laue yelled at him to shut up, using an expletive. Then, he smacked Jeremiah on the side of the head.
A principal’s accusation
That morning, Elizabeth De Alba, an assistant principal, contacted Officer Laue over her walkie-talkie. The two met up in a crowded hallway, his body camera footage shows.
“He pushed me,” she told the officer, pointing out Jeremiah, who was walking ahead of them in a black sweatshirt, his hood up.
Jeremiah grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Antonio. His parents used drugs, records show, so his great-aunt and -uncle, Debra and Calvin Johnson, adopted him when he was a toddler. They raised him alongside nine other children.
The Johnsons described Jeremiah as a quiet, serious child who sang in the choir at his family’s Pentecostal church. He enjoyed school, but struggled with his class work. In eighth grade, school officials determined he had a learning disability, records show.
Jeremiah liked typical teenage things: video games and action movies; teasing his sisters and doting on his baby niece. But by the time he enrolled at Judson High, he had been in several fights and was introduced to a gang by his older, biological brother.
He first crossed paths with Officer Laue in February 2023, when he was a freshman. The officer restrained him to keep him from fighting with another student, police records show. The next week, Officer Laue received a tip about two photos on social media that showed Jeremiah in a bedroom holding a gun, according to the records. Jeremiah had it for protection from a rival gang, he told a reporter in a recent interview.
Nine months later, Ms. De Alba accused Jeremiah, then a sophomore, of pushing her in the hallway. So Officer Laue navigated his way through a crowd of students to confront him, the footage shows.
They led the boy toward the school police office. “Let’s go,” Officer Laue said.
From Combat to the Classroom
A few minutes later, Officer Laue stood over Jeremiah, berating him. He taunted him for crying. He told him he would go to jail and stay there.
“That’s your future,” Officer Laue said.
The episode inside the office was captured entirely on the second officer’s body camera. That officer, Richard Radziski, repeatedly urged his colleague to calm down. Five times, he raised his hand and signaled Officer Laue to stop. But the disparagement continued.
At one point, Officer Laue accused Jeremiah of assaulting a school administrator. Jeremiah insisted he had not, and urged him to check the school surveillance cameras.
“You think I believe you over her?” Officer Laue asked.
Jeremiah shook his head. “Of course you don’t,” he answered.
Officer Laue, then 41, had been working for the school district police department for two years. It was his first job in law enforcement, and like all new officers, he went through the police academy. He received the 20 hours of state-mandated training specific to school policing. (Texas’ training is half the minimum recommended by the National Association of School Resource Officers.)
Before policing, Officer Laue served in the U.S. Army. He enlisted in 2004, records show, and during his nine years of service he deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. For a time after his discharge, he operated technical equipment in the West Texas oil fields.
In an interview earlier this year, Officer Laue told The Times and The Express-News that he had thought his military experience would give him an advantage in law enforcement. But initially, he found Judson High unnerving. The crowded hallways made him “a little agoraphobic,” he said.
Still, he enjoyed mentoring students. Some, he said, had even asked him to come to their graduations.
When asked about the incident with Jeremiah, Officer Laue said that he had “put pressure on his midsection” only to get him into the chair.
He acknowledged that he had been “riled up” in the office, but could not say why.
“I don’t get that mad very often,” he added.
‘I Got You’
Inside the school that day, word was spreading that Jeremiah had been tackled and handcuffed. His physical education teacher, Kirk Logan, raced to the school police office as soon as he heard.
On his mind was the history of violence between police officers and Black people like Jeremiah and himself, he said in an interview.
“I’m not going to let it get there,” he recalled thinking.
Mr. Logan had a friendly relationship with Jeremiah — they talked often about music, sports and making good choices. He had recently served on a school committee that drew up a set of disability accommodations for the teen, records show. Such Individualized Education Program documents, known as I.E.P.s, are used for many students in public schools.
Part of Jeremiah’s plan advised school employees to avoid “power struggles” and to let him cool down if he got upset. It is unclear if that document, which was finalized days before the incident, was provided to Officer Laue.
When Mr. Logan arrived in the school police office, Jeremiah rose from his chair, footage shows. He begged the teacher to call his mother.
“Sit down or I’ll put you down!” Officer Laue shouted.
Mr. Logan positioned himself between Jeremiah and the officer.
He cupped the back of Jeremiah’s head. “Hey, Jeremiah,” he said, touching his forehead to the boy’s. “I got you.”
Several minutes later, Ms. De Alba arrived and shared her account of what had happened: She said that she had caught Jeremiah skipping class and suspended him, and then he pushed her.
Jeremiah interrupted, saying he had not skipped class. “When did I push you?” he asked.
Officials for the Judson school district did not provide any surveillance footage of the interaction between Ms. De Alba and Jeremiah to The Times and The Express-News, saying its release would compromise campus security.
Ms. De Alba and Officer Radziski declined to comment for this article. Both still work for the school district, payroll records show.
‘An ugly day’
Jeremiah was charged as a juvenile with assault and resisting arrest. The assault charge was later reduced to making a threat, court records show. He was put on probation, which was extended after he was caught smoking marijuana and repeatedly broke his evening curfew. At one point, he had to wear an ankle monitor, he said, which he hid under his pant leg around his classmates.
He stopped going to school last fall. Now 18, Jeremiah says he no longer hangs out with the boys in the gang. He spends his free time playing games on his phone and listening to songs by Lil Poppa and NBA YoungBoy, who rap about betrayal and feeling misunderstood.
He recently got a job washing dishes — a step toward getting his life together. He wants an apartment and to be able to support himself. More education may be in his future, but he does not plan to return to Judson High.
Since the episode with Officer Laue, he said, he has a visceral reaction to seeing police officers on the street. “I just go into shock,” he said.
His takeaway from what happened? Officers “show no mercy.”
Officer Laue said that he had been reprimanded for yelling at Jeremiah and ordered to take an anger management course. A district spokeswoman declined requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions about the encounter.
In an email, the spokeswoman said that the district “takes all matters involving student safety and student concerns seriously” and is “committed to continuously reviewing its practices.”
The only record in Officer Laue’s personnel file that the school district released was his resignation letter. He left a year and a half after the incident.
He told The Times and The Express-News that he did not like policing and that he is now an emergency medical technician. “It’s more of a feel-good profession,” he said. “I don’t have to be mean to people.”
The officer added that he had “nothing against” Jeremiah and hoped he was doing well.
After the arrest, he recalled, he watched surveillance footage of the interaction between the teenager and Ms. De Alba. Based on what he could see in that video, it appeared Jeremiah “might have brushed past her,” Officer Laue said.
“I wouldn’t have called that an assault,” he said.
Had he seen the footage before confronting Jeremiah, he said, he would have turned him over to a school administrator and declined to press criminal charges.
Looking back, he added, the whole situation could have unfolded a lot differently. “I wish we didn’t have an ugly day,” he said.
Asher Lehrer-Small contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research. Produced by Rumsey Taylor.
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