New York City officials are investigating a confrontation at a city-run shelter in Queens where police officers struck and used a stun gun on a Venezuelan migrant while he was holding his 1-year-old son.
Video footage obtained by The New York Times shows two police officers, who had been called to the shelter over a dispute on Friday night, trying to restrain the man, Yanny Cordero, 47, while he is backed against a closed elevator door at the shelter, his child held tightly in his arms.
One of the officers pulls out a yellow stun gun and appears to stun Mr. Cordero before throwing a punch at his head, the video shows.
The officers continue to restrain Mr. Cordero after they separate him from his son, pinning his head against a desk as they try to wrestle him to the floor. A third officer gets involved and punches Mr. Cordero twice in the face before the officers subdue and arrest him.
“This is abuse, brother!” a man who recorded the video with his phone is heard shouting in Spanish. “Don’t hit him! Don’t hit him! Don’t hit him, brother! That’s an abuse! Where are the human rights?”
The police said they were responding to a call about a dispute involving an intoxicated man who was threatening staff members. They said that officers on the scene gave Mr. Cordero multiple warnings and commands to hand the child to someone else.
Mr. Cordero said he had not been drinking that night because he had to work the next day. He said the dispute began when he returned to the shelter, in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, with dinner for his family. A shelter employee struck him in the face by the elevators as he struggled to communicate in English, he said.
Mr. Cordero was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and violent behavior, obstructing government administration and acting in a manner injurious to a child under 17. The police also arrested and charged his wife, Andrea Parra, 23, who is seen in the video throwing her body between her husband and the police officers.
The couple said that when they were arrested, their 1-year-old son, Yusneide, and their two other boys, ages 3 and 5, were taken by the city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services.
Mr. Cordero and Ms. Parra were released on Saturday night, nearly 24 hours after the altercation, and were reunited with their children on Monday night. The family has been moved to a shelter in Brooklyn.
“We are aware of an incident involving a family in our care at an emergency shelter in Jamaica, Queens, Friday night,” a spokeswoman for City Hall said in a statement. “The health and safety of all migrants and longtime New Yorkers in our care — especially young children — is always a top priority, and this matter is currently under investigation.”
The police said Yusneide was unharmed, but Mr. Cordero said he believed the altercation had affected him.
“He was trembling and he pooped and peed himself,” Mr. Cordero said in an interview.
The Police Department did not respond to questions about whether it believed the officers handled the situation correctly, and did not provide footage from their body-worn cameras.
It is unclear from the two-and-a-half-minute video what happened immediately leading up to the clash at the shelter, which is one of the dozens of city-run shelters housing the nearly 65,000 migrants in the city’s care.
As the number of migrants being housed by the city has ballooned, city officials have begun to impose more restrictions on the hotels, shelters and tent dormitories where they are staying.
The city has imposed curfews at a handful of shelters following neighborhood complaints and several high-profile crimes involving migrants. Last month, the police arrested a migrant for disorderly conduct at a giant tent shelter on Randall’s Island following a confrontation with the police.
Mr. Cordero, an electrician in his home country who has been working odd construction jobs since arriving in New York, said that he left the shelter around 10 p.m. on Friday night to buy food because his family did not like what was served at the shelter.
He said his wife stayed behind with the three children in their room at the shelter, where they had been staying since December.
Mr. Cordero, who does not speak English, said that when he returned to the lobby with the food, a shelter employee by the elevators seemed to tell him in English that he could not bring the food up to the room, an unwritten shelter policy to reduce infestation, according to city officials. (Some migrants at the shelter said in interviews that staff members routinely threw out food and beverages discovered in rooms.)
Mr. Cordero said he used a translation app on his phone to try to tell the employee that he was going to the cafeteria to eat the meat over rice he had bought and that his family would come down to join him.
Mr. Cordero said that the employee called over a colleague, who he said appeared to become hostile as Mr. Cordero struggled to communicate with the phone app. The second shelter employee, Mr. Cordero said, suddenly struck him in the face.
Mr. Cordero said he did not strike back and instead put his hands behind his back and began taunting the employee in Spanish to hit him again while he was defenseless, challenging him to a fight outside.
Andry Barreto, the Venezuelan migrant who recorded the video, corroborated Mr. Cordero’s account, saying in an interview that he was outside looking into the shelter lobby through a window and saw the employee strike Mr. Cordero.
City officials did not immediately respond to questions about the shelter employees’ conduct.
Mr. Barreto, who is also the children’s godfather, said he went inside and began recording with his phone as the situation began to escalate.
The employees called the police, Mr. Cordero and Mr. Barreto said. Mr. Cordero’s wife, Ms. Parra, showed up with the three children around the time the police arrived, and she gave Yusneide to Mr. Cordero to hold.
At one point, Mr. Cordero is heard screaming in the video as he clings to Yusneide, and as other migrants shout “The baby! The baby!” in Spanish.
Mr. Cordero said that the police stunned him several times, but he said he did not feel much.
“I never lifted my hand,” Mr. Cordero said. “I never told the police anything except not to touch my child.”
Mr. Cordero and Ms. Parra said that after they were released from custody, they were only allowed to talk to their children through a video call. The couple spent Sunday visiting different city offices trying to retrieve them.
On Tuesday, Mr. Cordero said he was happy to have his children back, but dismayed they had been put in harm’s way.
“I feel very sad because my children went through something they should have never gone through,” Mr. Cordero said. “We’re poor, but we’ve raised them right to try to avoid these types of spectacles.”