Award-winning reporter Pete Demetriou has driven through firestorms, been splashed by water drops from firefighting helicopters, and stared down LAPD skirmish lines in the streets of Los Angeles – all while live on the air.
And on Sunday, he found himself in the line of fire when the National Guard fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of demonstrators protesting federal immigration raids in downtown L.A.
“Sorry, got a little bit dicey here, folks. I just took a hit to the leg with a 40mm impact round,” Demetriou said during the live broadcast.
“Pete, how do you stay in the air when you got hit in the leg like that?” anchor Rob Archer asked.
“What do you mean how do you stay on the air? You stay on the air because you have to,” Demetriou replied. “It’s your job.”
Recounting the incident in the studio on Monday, Demetriou explained that the confrontation began when a few protesters threw water bottles and soda cans at the National Guard troops. Within seconds, the soldiers responded with pepper spray and gas.
“It was sort of like a pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and then all of a sudden that and you've got a mist and then all of a sudden you got a white cloud of smoke coming at you,” he said. “If you’ve never had CS or CN gas and a face full of it like that, your eyes close, your nose shuts down, your throat locks up. You can't do anything but try to struggle to breathe.”
Demetriou and his security detail, Jose Aceves, got into their car and took a minute or two to recover.
“It's very intense, very quick, and you go into survival mode when that happens,” Demetriou said. “You do what you have to do, and in my case, you regroup. Why? I can't do my job if I can't tell people what's going on. So that was the objective: Get myself to a position and a point where I could get back on the air to tell people what was going on.”
Pretty soon, Demetriou was back on the scene – taking an impact round to the leg. But he said he doesn’t believe he was targeted on purpose.
“When you're down range and they're using dispersal weapons, things happen,” he said. “You're gonna have pellets flying in directions. In some cases with the 40s, it's because they determined there's a specific person they want to discourage, because if you hit a person and you put them down or they withdraw after being hit, the synergistic effect is that other protesters nearby will also back up and that's what they were trying to do.”
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least four other journalists were injured during the weekend of protests, including an Australian TV reporter who was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet during a live broadcast.
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