Editor’s note • The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.
Kamal Bewar insists the campfire was out.
But when he, his friends and their children returned to their site at Storm Mountain Picnic Area last summer, they found a note accusing them of having left it burning. They had to leave, the camp hosts had written.
Bewar told the hosts, a husband and wife, they would go — but they wanted a refund of the fee they paid for their spot in Big Cottonwood Canyon. The husband decided to call 911.
The responding officer would end up handcuffing Bewar, taking him to the ground and forcing him to stay there on his stomach until backup arrived. The officer’s unnecessary use of force, Bewar charges, left him, his distressed children and friends feeling disturbed and unsafe.
“I still can’t sleep,” Bewar said. “It’s been five months. I still — honestly, the image, I can’t get it out.” His 13-year-old son echoes: “for a week straight at school, in basketball, at home — the only image in my head was seeing my dad getting thrown on the floor. It was just shocking to me at that moment and traumatizing for me after.”
Bewar was released and no charges were filed, but he’s frustrated that his accusation of excessive force was rejected by the Unified Police Department.
He also asserts the hosts discriminated against his group in calling 911 and escalating their September encounter to police, which the couple did twice last summer, police records show — both times, about men from Iraq.
The first call was about Sattar Al Hamashi — another father who visited the picnic area with his children in July. The second call was about Bewar, interim director of Salt Lake Community College’s STEM Learning Resource Center, who is a leader in Utah’s Kurdish community and also originally from Iraq.
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