A pregnant woman traveling to the doctor's office with her boyfriend had a violent encounter with BART police that we reported on in August, and she now says the incident caused her to suffer a miscarriage. According to the Chronicle, the woman was handcuffed behind her back, made to lay on her stomach, and had a knee pressed into her despite department policy explicitly prohibiting such treatment of pregnant women. BART police say they were unaware that she was pregnant.

Andrea Appleton, 24, was riding then train with her boyfriend on July 29 when she says a white passenger started harassing her and telling her she smelled bad. Her boyfriend, 22-year-old Michael Smith, got in an argument with the man, and Appleton and Smith exited the train at Embarcadero Station. They were met there by BART police with guns drawn.

The white passenger had allegedly falsely reported that Smith was armed and had tried to rob him, thus eliciting the BART police response. Both Appleton and Smith are black, and two passengers on the train say backed up Appleton's claim that the man had been harassing them.

Smith's subsequent arrest was caught on video, with witnesses alleging excessive force by BART police. KRON 4 reports that Smith was charged and acquitted on four counts of battery on an officer, but the jury hung on two separate battery charges as well as resisting an officer.

As the Examiner explains, prosecutors could still retry the case, but Public Defender Jeff Adachi is calling for charges to be dropped, and for the case to be used as an instructional one to reform police policy.

BART Spokeswoman Alicia Trost defended the officers' actions, saying that while handcuffing Appleton behind her back was against agency policy, it wasn't clear at the time that she was in fact pregnant. "In this case, it was not clear or known if the female was pregnant," said Trost in a statement. "She was not visibly showing. After the adult female said she was pregnant, body cameras show the officer treated her with respect, stood her up in a comfortable position almost immediately, moved her away from possible injury that could occur, and asked her about her wellbeing or if she needed medical attention, which she declined."

Appleton miscarried two weeks after Smith's arrest, and has been struggling with depression ever since. “It’s not right,” she told the Chronicle. “It’s not fair to me or my boyfriend to lose our child and to have to go through this.”

BART police Deputy Chief Jeffrey Jenner defended the officers' actions to the Chronicle saying, "Our job is to make sure that the citizens who ride BART are safe and the officers are safe. In this case, nobody was hurt in the sense of an action that BART PD did. We worked within our training and we worked within our policy. None of this would have happened if Mr. Smith complied."

But Public Defender Jeff Adachi maintains that this was a case of excessive force. "We often talk about policy and the use of force, but this is an actual case where you can see how the system failed Michael Smith and Andrea Appleton,” Adachi said in a statement. “We’re here not to only look at one criminal case but how we can improve BART policy so this does not happen again in the future.”

Below, ABC 7 shows us some of the body cam footage of the incident, just released by BART police.

Previously: Claims Of Racism Following Violent BART Arrest