Tony Phillips, the 44-year-old man charged with a felony count of resisting an executive officer and assault on a peace officer in his fight last week with Mayor Daniel Lurie’s security detail, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday morning.
His court-appointed attorney, Ivan Rodriguez, put much of the blame for the incident on Lurie, who approached several men on the sidewalk and street at the edge of the Tenderloin on Thursday evening, asking them to move along, as Mission Local first reported. The men refused to move, Rodriguez acknowledged, and Phillips became “argumentative, not combative.”
A San Francisco police officer assigned to Lurie’s security detail, however, engaged physically — he is seen on video twice shoving Phillips before the two men ended up grappling to the pavement. The officer, Joel Aguayo, ended up bleeding from the back of his head after striking it on the ground…