A Maryland County has announced a settlement with a Black mother who sued the county and two two officers after they violated her son’s civil rights. Late last month the Office of the County Attorney for Montgomery County announced it has settled a lawsuit filed by Shanta Grant against the county’s Board of Education and the two cops for $275,000, according to the city’s press release.

The alleged 20 counts, including assault, battery, false arrest, false imprisonment, and negligence, according to DCist.com.

Court documents said on Jan. 14, 2020, not far from East Silver Spring Elementary School, police officers Dionne Holiday and Kevin Christmon found a 5-year-old Black boy who was reported missing from the school according to WTOP News.

According to the lawsuit filed by the child’s mother said, her son was verbally abused, threatened, and handcuffed by the cops.

The comments made to the boy were captured on the officers’ bodycams released on March 26, 2021. Once he started to handcuff the boy, Christmon said, “These are for people that don’t want to listen and don’t know how to act. If someone tells you to sit down and shut up, any adult, you better sit down and shut up.”

While the detained boy was crying in the back of the patrol car, Christmon was recorded telling him to “cut that out.”

Holiday was heard teasing the boy, “Does your mama spank you? She’s going to spank you today.”

One of the officers further said, “this is why people need to beat their kids” and “I hope your mama let me beat you.”

The incident took over 51 minutes a little over a year later, the boy’s mother filed a lawsuit against the school district for not properly supervising her son.

“You can obviously see in the video the distress,” one of the family’s lawyers James Papirmeister, said, “We weren’t even needing to call the little boy as a witness: You could see him literally choking on his tears and gasping for breath because he was so catatonically traumatized.”

Once the County Council viewed the video, released a statement expressing how appalled they were at the incident.

“We are outraged by the conduct that we observed. The full Council offers its deepest apologies to the Grant family,” the joint statement said. “This incident is absolutely unacceptable: No child, not to mention a five-year-old child, should ever be treated this way by the people tasked with keeping our communities safe.”

It added, “This incident also reflects the need for increased police training on interactions with young children and de-escalating situations … We must do better for our children, our schools, and our community.”

The council called what the officers did to the boy, “child abuse,” condemning it “unequivocally.”

The payments will be distributed to the plaintiff in two checks from the County’s $87M Self-Insurance Fund. The two officers Holiday and Christmon, the city will pay $220,000 and has resolved to pay $55,000 on behalf of the Board of Education.

According to the terms of the agreement, the payment will include, “financial losses due to medical expenses, therapy expenses, counseling expenses, future educational expenses, or psychological/ psychiatric expenses incurred by” the child, whose name has not been released.

After the settlement Grant, nor her child, will be able to refile the lawsuit based on the incident. Matthew Bennet another family lawyer said, “This is life-changing money. It will go into a trust account, and it will earn interest. When the youngster is ready to go to college, he’ll have a large chunk of change to pay for his college.”

In a statement, County Executive Marc Elrich says, “We are pleased to see that the parties involved in this case reached a settlement; I had been pushing for this for quite some time.”