
” Karen Fludd wants to know the truth about how her 17-year-old son became a quadriplegic and eventually died after NYPD officers stopped him for fare-beating one night last May.
The Red Hook mother said she has received very little information about what transpired — but what she does know is her son’s version of events involves accusations of excessive force and widely diverges from the vague account police gave her.
The police told her that on May 5, 2013, her son, Deion Fludd, was spotted squeezing through a turnstile at the Rockaway Avenue station in Brownsville with his girlfriend on a single MetroCard swipe. When officers approached them, Fludd ran onto the C train tracks, the teen’s mother said she was told by police.
Karen Fludd, 48, said police told her that after her son ran, a subway train clipped him. The crash fractured his skull and left him with two spinal fractures.
But before he died from his injuries on July 12, 2013, Deion gave his mother a blow-by-blow account that didn’t involve a subway train.
“ We asked him if he got hit by a train. He immediately said ‘no,’” Karen recalled her son telling her at Kings County Hospital, where he was treated for nearly two months. “He was very adamant that he did not get hit by a train.”
Karen said Deion told her he did flee police when the officers tried to arrest him. He ran the length of the subway platform as officers followed him and then bounded onto the C line tracks, running to the platform at the next station at Ralph Avenue.
There, an officer caught him and hit him on the back of the head with a flashlight, according to Deion’s account.
Deion told his mom that officers then held him down with their feet on his back as he struggled until his voice suddenly stopped working.
“ They said, ‘Oh, you gonna be running? We are going to make sure your ass don’t run again,’” Deion recalled the officers telling him, according to Karen. “