A University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, student was maced and arrested after he rode his bike through a cordoned-off area of campus and attempted to challenge a campus preacher.
The student, identified as 24-year-old Cole Philip Montalvo, was riding his bike through a coned perimeter surrounding a female preacher Thursday. Several officers in the area guarding the Evangelist, Angela Cummings, approached Montalvo and pushed him face down to the ground, later placing him in handcuffs and hauling him off, a video shows.
“Hey ma’am, if you’re trying to spread the good word, maybe you shouldn’t be telling everyone that they’re sinners,” the student can be heard telling Cummings before police forced him to the ground.
According to The Chattanoogan, Montalvo was arrested by UTC Police Sgt. Willie Trueitt for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, obstruction of justice and inciting a riot.
As Trueitt and three other campus security officers wrestled with Montalvo, even going so far as to sit on top of him, a crowd of students began to form. The onlookers can be heard pleading with the officers, asking them to let the student stand up and saying Montalvo didn’t do anything but attempt to ride his bicycle through the area. Others asked the officers to simply tell the 24-year-old what he did wrong, but not a single one provided an answer.
One officer can be heard threatening to tase the student and another video, recorded by a student who was watching the incident, shows Trueitt spraying Montalvo with mace, though the officer missed his face.
According to The Chattanooga Times Free Press, Trueitt said he asked Montalvo several times to leave the coned area. After the student failed to comply, Trueitt arrested him.
A YouTube video titled “Police Brutality on UTC Campus” notes Cummings has been open-air preaching at the school for several weeks.
“Several times over the past couple weeks UTC has allowed and endorsed a fire and brimstone preaching fanatical woman to come and scream hate and damnation at its students,” the video’s description reads. ‘They provided her a huge coned in circle with security and police to judge their students. …
UTC continues to provide shelter for this woman whom the student body has made very clear that she is unwelcome.”
Cummings rants include her yelling at students unprovoked, calling them “adulterers and adulteresses.”
She continuously tells students “how horrible we all are, how we’re living in our sins and will go to hell, and general condemnations against people of other races or sexual preferences,” Alyssa Fjeld, a fourth-year student at UTC, told The Chattanooga Times Free Press.
The university is conducting an internal review of the incident, UTC Associate Vice Chancellor of Communication and Marketing Chuck Cantrell told The Huffington Post. Cantrell did reconcile that Cummings’ messages do elicit strong reactions, but said the university is required to allow the Evangelist to preach.
“The street preacher’s presentation is offensive to many and causes strong responses,” Cantrell said. “As a public campus, we are legally required to provide for the expression of diverse ideas on our campus. We believe that a college campus should be a place for free exchange of ideas and expressions. This individual had filled out the proper paperwork to appear and the person who was arrested was violating the procedure established by our campus police.”
Since the incident, students at UTC have started a petition on Change.org calling on University of Tennessee President Dr. Joe DiPietro to ban “verbally abusive protesters” from the campus.
“What UTC doesn’t seem to realize is that they have engaged in a type of business deal with each of its students,” the petition states. “We pay the school thousands every semester for a service. We expect that service to be delivered in a professional manner, on a peaceful campus. By allowing this woman to scream in the middle of our campus, UTC is not properly delivering the service we have paid for.”
More than 1,280 have signed the petition as of Monday afternoon.
Watch a video of the arrest below. Montalvo first comes into view at around 7:15.
