"He wasn't a threat to those officers. He was going the other way, he was running away, he wasn't running toward them, he didn't have any weapons on him," said Quintana. "That's an assault — that's police brutality.”

"The officers cannot create the need to use force. They cannot escalate the situation and create the need to use force. And that happened here," Sykes said. "Just because it's in policy doesn't make it constitutional. It can still be excessive. And the number of strikes and viciousness with which they occurred is, I think, astonishing here. I've seldom seen that.

Sykes maintains that even if police thought Sims had a gun, it’s not justification to use the force they did in the absence of other aggravating circumstances. “There was no legal basis to use force. There just wasn’t,” Sykes said. He went on, labeling the incident “a vicious beating for a misdemeanor.”

“The first thing out of his mouth — he said, ‘Mom, they beat me,’” Quintana told KSL TV. “(He) said, ‘I just took it, mom. I didn’t want to make it worse.’”

“They beat him unnecessarily,” Shawn Sims’ mother, Marsha Quintana, said in her attorney’s Salt Lake City law office Monday during a news conference announcing the lawsuit. “He wasn’t fighting them, he wasn’t violent, he didn’t threaten them. They just beat him because he was there.”

“They can’t beat him to a pulp,” Robert Sykes told ABC4. Sykes is the attorney representing Sims. “He may be blind for life because of this. It’s gross use of excessive force. It’s unconstitutional.” Sykes told ABC4 that they will soon be filing a case against the police officers involved.

Sykes said they believe officers used more force than was necessary.

“All for allegedly not being compliant,” Sykes said. “It’s a very minor offense. You don’t beat someone to a pulp for that.”