The family of Marcel Hamer, the teenager apparently punched unconscious by an undercover detective in Clinton Hill last summer after being accused of smoking marijuana, is suing the city and the two detectives involved for $95 million, according to court papers filed last week. The lawsuit singles out Det. Sekou Bourne for delivering the knockout blow to Hamer while he lay in a tree-planter pleading, "It was just a cigarette, sir," and Det. Jon Gladstone for assisting in the arrest. Video of the punch went viral following a report by The Brooklyn Paper last October.

As the paper reported, Hamer's narrative of what happened before the video picks up is as follows:

Lawyers for Marcel Hamer say he was walking home from a store down Gates Avenue with friends near Waverly Avenue around 3:30 pm on June 4, when the plainclothes cop jumped out of a blue van and accused him of smoking marijuana. He and his friends started to run, then stopped, Hamer told a registered nurse at Brooklyn Hospital Center.
The cop caught up to him, pushed him to the ground, and Hamer hit his left arm on a planter rail, after which he couldn’t move it, he said, according to medical records.

The lawsuit claims assault, false arrest, and malicious prosecution. The Hamer family's lawyer, Jim Ross, said Hamer is suffering from neurological problems as a result, including headaches, dizziness, and memory loss, but that he is still in school. The lawsuit also claims that the fabrication of evidence and brutality Hamer was allegedly subjected to are consistent with the "customs, policies, and practices" of the NYPD. Ross said that Hamer's case is an example of stop-and-frisk gone wrong.

"A lot of bad encounters start that way, where you begin questioning them and searching them," he said. "Those types of situations tend to lead to problems, even where the person is doing their best to try to cooperate."

Ross said that all too often cops are allowed to lie and abuse people with impunity, as happened here.

"There's an element where police officers make bad arrests and maybe even use too much physical force during an arrest, and they're just permitted to go back on the street the next day as if nothing happened," he said.

A spokesman for the city's Law Department declined to comment on the suit beyond saying, "We will review the allegations and all the evidence."

Being sued for alleged civil rights violations is nothing new for these two detectives. Bourne has been hit with six other lawsuits in Brooklyn federal court in the last decade, all alleging false arrest, as well as warrant-less searches, fabricated evidence, and beatings. Each of those cases settled out of court, three for a total of $72,888, and three others for undisclosed amounts.

Detective Gladstone was named in two more such lawsuits, including one where two men claimed a group of 10 officers including Gladstone barged into his apartment and began beating them while they were sleeping, then arrested them. Both of those suits settled for undisclosed amounts.

In several of the lawsuits, people alleged Bourne or Gladstone operated as part of a group of brutal narcotics detectives who barged into apartments without warrants and ransacked them, or rolled up on people on sidewalks without any reason. Several go on to say the groups of as many as 10 officers then roughed up their targets, and after finding nothing, arrested them anyway, sometimes driving them around in an unmarked van for several hours before processing them. In each case, the charges were either dismissed, or the arrestees were released without explanation.

Bourne also faced an internal investigation after an East New York woman complained that he tackled her and injured her when she opened her apartment door holding a lollipop, according to a New York Post report. Bourne denied tackling the woman but testified that when she asked, "What do you want," he thought she was offering him drugs, the tabloid wrote.

The NYPD declined to comment. Mary Hamer did not answer calls made to numbers listed for her.

Update 4:10 pm:

Details of claims against Det. Jon Gladstone in a prior lawsuit clarified. Comments added from the Hamer family's attorney, Jim Ross.