Officer Stephen Hicks’ attorney says the child wasn’t on an e-bike, but a 50-mph battery-powered motorcycle not allowed in the skate park.<\/p>\n
JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. \u2014 The attorney for a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office officer accused of slamming a teenager to the ground at a skate park says his client was protecting children from a dangerous motorized motorcycle, not an e-bike as initially reported.<\/p>\n
Philip Vogelsang, general counsel for the Fraternal Order of Police, told First Coast News the Jan. 17 incident at Sunshine Park skate park involved a battery-powered motorcycle capable of 50 mph.<\/p>\n
“He was riding a, basically a battery-powered motorcycle that goes 50 miles an hour,” Vogelsang said.<\/p>\n
Video of the confrontation, First Coast News\u00a0obtained from a parent at the scene, appears to show 36-year-old Stephen Hicks, a five-year JSO veteran, grabbing the teen off the bike and taking him down.<\/p>\n
Hicks was off-duty with his family at the time, according to the sheriff’s office.<\/p>\n
Witnesses told police he showed his badge afterward. Hicks now faces a misdemeanor battery charge and has been released on bond. He’s been reassigned within JSO pending the investigation, with his next court hearing set for Feb. 17.<\/p>\n
Vogelsang argues riders of that bike need to have a motorcycle license, be 16 years or older, and be restricted to roadways, not skate parks.<\/p>\n
“This was a motorcycle, so the crime of reckless driving was being committed at a park where a child could have been killed by a vehicle, and this officer chose to put the safety of the public first,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said multiple parents had already warned the kids to stop riding before Hicks intervened.<\/p>\n
A witness previously told First Coast News, “They were both on the wrong side, but like that wasn’t fair to do that to the kid.”<\/p>\n
“The actions of the officer, that’s, no. I mean, that’s, that’s too much,” he said.<\/p>\n
A child who saw it all unfold called the officer’s actions “frightening.”<\/p>\n
JSO internal records show Hicks has faced eight investigations since 2022, including five chargeable traffic crashes, which Vogelsang called routine and automatically investigated per policy.<\/p>\n
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He received informal counseling in 2022 for a response-to-resistance violation and in 2023 for a secondary employment issue. A 2024 allegation of unnecessary use of force was reviewed, but officials determined Hicks acted lawfully.<\/p>\n
“The only discipline he’s ever received was for a traffic crash, and those are automatically, it’s not a complaint filed by a citizen,” Vogelsang said. “Every traffic crash is on an officer’s record.”<\/p>\n
Vogelsang urged patience with the process and said that despite his disciplinary record, Hicks was doing what he believed was right to protect others.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, he has to now go through this process for what he perceived as being a good deed that day and helping prevent a child from being seriously injured,” Vogelsang said. “Let the investigation play out. There’s a criminal investigation that’s there for a reason, and those facts are gonna come to fruition. His intervening that day potentially saved a kid’s life.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Officer Stephen Hicks’ attorney says the child wasn’t on an e-bike, but a 50-mph battery-powered motorcycle not allowed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-133114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}