It was 28 seconds of police fury.
For that brief period, 10 Philadelphia police pummeled and kicked a suspected carjacker Wednesday, landing 59 blows on a man already wounded from police gunshots.
With a ring of officers jostling for position, police punched the man at least a dozen times and kicked him at least 46 times. The final blow came when an officer slammed the man on the shin with a police radio.
The tally of blows is evident from a frame-by-frame scrutiny of the WPVI-TV (Channel 6) video that captured the violent North Philadelphia arrest, which has been broadcast repeatedly around the nation.
Five official investigations are under way to unravel what happened from the time police say they spotted the suspect, Thomas Jones, 30, of North Philadelphia, in a stolen car at 12:39 p.m. Wednesday to his capture about 20 minutes later.
What was not caught on video was the dramatic and dangerous start to the mayhem.
Police pursued Jones in a high-speed car chase, but he eluded them by careening through a crowd of funeral mourners on a sidewalk, authorities said..
Officers managed to pull him over a few minutes later, but he broke free and took command of a police cruiser. He tore off after heavy police gunfire that wounded him and shattered the cruiser's rear window.
As an estimated 10 officers fired at Jones, getting off 40 or more shots, Jones shot and wounded one officer and tried to run down a second, police officials said. He was charged yesterday with two counts of attempted murder and other offenses.
Though much remains unresolved, Wednesday's chaotic events came into markedly sharper focus yesterday. Analysis of the video showed that the vast majority of blows were delivered by only three officers.
They were a black plainclothes officer who kicked Jones 17 times, a white plainclothes officer who kicked and punched him 14 times, and a black officer in uniform who kicked him 10 times.
With video of police surrounding and beating an African American suspect, the episode inevitably spurred recollection of the brutal 1991 arrest of Rodney King by Los Angeles police.
But Police Commissioner John F. Timoney rejected any such comparison.
In Philadelphia, Timoney said at a news conference yesterday, police faced "a very fluid situation after a high-speed auto pursuit where a police officer is shot. And unlike in the Rodney King video, you do see Philadelphia supervisors breaking it up, going in to try and establish control."
