Mercer believes police officers were following her the day she met her son to retrieve her slippers. They surrounded her on the sidewalk about two blocks from her former home, she says.

“They accused me of breaking into my place,” she says.

Officers handcuffed her. She was complying with their orders, she says, when four officers placed her face down on the pavement with her hands behind her back. The officers lifted her off the ground and dropped her, smashing her head into the pavement. They repeated this several times, she says, leaving her with three gashes on her head, a concussion and abrasions on her face.

“Each time they did it I thought I was going to have brain damage, or I didn’t think I was going to survive,” she says.

As two officers pinned her down by her shoulders, another put weight on her leg. The force fractured a bone below her knee. It was when she tried to adjust her leg, which was now bent at an odd angle, that police accused her of resisting, she says. When she couldn’t walk to the police vehicle, Mercer says, officers picked her up by the handcuffs and threw her in, hitting her head on the door.

“When they brought me to the hospital,” she says, “they tried to force me to walk, but I couldn’t, so they picked me up by the handcuffs again.”

“The doctors looked shocked.”