A pregnant St. Louis woman was blinded in her left eye after a police officer on Tuesday fired a non-lethal bean bag round at her car on the outskirts of Ferguson, according to reports. The woman claimed on Facebook that she had to have her eye removed.
Dornnella Conner was sitting in the passenger seat of the vehicle at a BP gas station on New Halls Ferry Road in St. Louis when the incident occurred, New York Daily News reported. Police had been called to the area after reports of trouble during a night of unrest in Ferguson and across the U.S..
Conner's boyfriend, De’Angelas Lee, was reportedly driving the car out of the gas station when police opened fire.
Conner says he was trying to drive around the officers. However, police say he was driving toward them, and that the officer fired because he feared for his own safety, according to local media. The bean bag round hit and shattered the front passenger window.
"I didn’t have any weapons, I wasn’t looting or anything. I was just out with my boyfriend. We was just riding around respecting Mike Brown," she told local media outlet KMOV.
"I'm very upset and very disappointed with the tactics that they used," Conner's father Donnell added. "I understand that it was chaos, but there was no reason to fire upon an innocent person sitting in a vehicle. How can a pregnant person, in a car in a seatbelt, be causing chaos?”
Conner subsequently vowed to seek justice for the incident on her Facebook page (where she also goes by the name "Lenora Prince"). "I will have justice for what they've done to me," she wrote, "But I'm happy I'm alive."
Sixteen people were arrested at the gas station, and police say they still don't know who was firing gunshots there. They've issued a warrant for the arrest of Lee, Conner's boyfriend.