Details about the confrontation continue to emerge. The Cavalier Daily obtained this video footage of the incident:





An eyewitness account given to The Daily Progress offers this rundown:

Third-year College student Bryan Beaubrun, who said he witnessed the incident, said an ABC agent approached Johnson shortly after the bouncer at Trinity asked him to step aside after refusing to accept his ID. “Martese was talking to the bouncer and there was some discrepancy about his ID,” Beaubrun said. “[An] ABC officer approaches Martese and grabs him by the elbow…and pulls him to the side.” “It happened so quickly,” Beaubrun said. “Out of nowhere I saw the two officers wrestling Martese to the ground. I was shocked that it escalated that quickly. Eventually [he was] on the ground, they’re trying to put handcuffs on him and their knees were on his back.”

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe requested an independent investigation into the arrest:

Gov. McAuliffe has requested an independent State Police investigation of ABC arrest last night in Cville in which a student was injured. — Terry McAuliffe (@GovernorVA) March 18, 2015



There's been an outpouring of support for Johnson from across the country. On Twitter, the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, which became popular during similar scandals last year, resurfaced.

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Overreaction on the part of the Virginia ABC doesn't appear to be anything new. Almost two years ago, Elizabeth Daly, then a 20-year-old UVA student, was arrested and spent the night in jail when plainclothes ABC officers mistook her carton of bottled water for a six-pack of beer. One officer apparently drew a gun, and Daly, not knowing if the men were law enforcement or not, reportedly panicked and attempted to drive out of the parking lot. Her car "grazed" one of the officers in the process, according to reports.



Daly, who's white, was initially charged with two counts of assaulting a law-enforcement officer and one count of eluding police. The charges were eventually dropped, and a year after that—after Daly's federal lawsuit—a settlement was reached. The Virginia ABC reprimanded the officers involved and made policy changes that were supposed to prevent something like this from happening again.



While it's unclear what will happen legally in this case—Johnson has already hired a lawyer—many critics are already framing it as yet another racially tinged confrontation between law enforcement and a young African American man. Like many of encounters between young men of color and the police, there is no explicit evidence that this situation was racially motivated. But rarely is there explicit evidence. Racism is often subconscious, only emerging when certain triggers are activated. Is that the case here? If so, what triggers might have prompted Miller to wrestle with Johnson on a sidewalk at four in the morning?