MIAMI – Prosecutors have released body camera video from the arrest of a Hollywood man who was filmed in January yelling racial slurs and threatening a group of black teenagers with a handgun.
Mark Bartlett, 51, was originally charged with carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, but Bartlett was later charged with three counts of aggravated assault with prejudice and one count of improper exhibition of a firearm after activists appealed to the state attorney's office.
The tense encounter began when a group of black teenagers blocked the Brickell Avenue Bridge on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to protest the redevelopment of the Liberty Square public housing complex. Bartlett's girlfriend, Dana Scalione, got into an argument with the teens, urging them to let traffic across the bridge.
At some point, Sacalione said, one of the boys ran over her foot with his bicycle, prompting a heated screaming match. As Sacalione walked away from the teens, Barlett approached the group holding a handgun at his side.
He then yelled obscenities and racial slurs at the teens, telling them to leave.
"F---ing stupid n-----s," Bartlett can be heard saying in a video of the incident.
Police officers later caught up with Bartlett in his blue Range Rover and arrested him.
"Oh my God, this is crazy," Bartlett told the officer in the body camera video. "How am I arrested right now when all these little black kids aren't?"
"You're being lawfully detained right now while we conduct our investigation," one of the officers can be heard saying in the body camera video.
Bartlett has maintained that he was merely protecting Scalione and never pointed the gun at the teens.
"Just so you know, they hit my wife. They ran over her foot. I came out there to protect her," Bartlett told the officers.
Bartlett appeared to be in good spirits in the video, laughing as an officer placed him, while handcuffed, into the back of a patrol car.
Another video shows Sacalione being taken into custody, but she was eventually released and never charged in connection with the incident.