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Keith Stephens just got his driver’s license last Thursday, and the 18-year-old Berkeley High Student was looking forward to Saturday night’s Senior Ball. 

Instead, he spent the weekend in the Berkeley jail. 

He, his sister and his grandmother were arrested in connection with a brawl with police that originated after Berkeley police approached the car he was driving, which lacked current vehicle registration. 

The incident brought out at least 15 police to the scene of the fight to help the two officers and calm the crowd of neighbors and family members that formed around the brawl. 

On Monday afternoon, Stephens, a high school football player, was charged with two misdemeanors by Judge Carol Brosnahan. 

Berkeley police said he attacked them. One of the misdemeanor charges was interfering with a police officer, the other was for battery of a police officer. He is scheduled to appear in Brosnahan’s courtroom Friday. Stephens had been held on $35,000 bail but Brosnahan released him on recognizance, in light of the fact that he did not have a prior record. 

Two of Stephen’s high school teachers came to court and attorney L.W. Holt, who came as a friend of the Stephens family, asked Flora Russ and Robert McKnight to stand up in support of their student. 

Deputy District Attorney David Lim had argued against bail, and he said that based on the police report, Stephens posed a danger to the community. 

Holt could not speak for Stephens because he did not represent him, and Brosnahan asked the youth several questions that he hesitated in answering. 

Lim said Stephens showed disrespect for law enforcement and was unresponsive to questions in his brief court appearance. 

When Brosnahan asked Stephens if he was aware of the severity of the charges, that he could spend 18 months in county jail, he responded with an audible “yes.” 

The incident occurred after Stephens parked his mother’s 1996 green Dodge Intrepid on the street next to his grandmother’s house in the 900 block of Channing Way. 

According to the Berkeley Police Department report, Stephens made an unprovoked attack on Officer Tim Gardner and on his partner Stan Libed. 

Capt. Bobby Miller said Stephens “jumped out of the car,” and when the officers asked him to return to the car he refused and hit Gardner in the head and body with his fist. 

Latisha Stephens, the student’s sister, who was a witness and a participant in the struggle between police and her brother, said he didn’t know a patrol car was behind him and he had “just stepped out of the car.” 

She said she and her grandmother were standing nearby and they scolded him for taking the car without permission or an up-to-date vehicle sticker. 

The student had picked up Latisha’s 4-year-old son and his 16-year-old cousin at the King Childcare Center, and a friend of his was riding in the passenger seat when he returned to his grandmother’s house, where he lives. 

He stood by the car and didn’t move, said Latisha, because “he knew he was in trouble with me (and his grandmother).” 

When the officers reached his car, she said one of them used his hand to push her brother back into the car. 

Soon afterward, she said the other officer held him “in a choke hold,” and pulled his hands behind his back, and then the first officer struck him with a “billy club” on his arms and legs, and then his head. 

Family members and neighbors gathered around the struggle, and 23-year-old Latisha said she asked the officers to stop hitting her brother. She became embroiled in the melee herself and said an officer struck her repeatedly in the thighs with his baton. 

She said her brother asked to be arrested, “but they still beat him.” She said he might have got his hands loose once to strike an officer, but that he was prevented from striking out because his hands were held behind his back. 

According to Miller, Gardner and Libed came to a stop behind the Stephens’ car and it moved a short distance and pulled to the curb. 

He said Gardner and Libed got out and noticed the registration was expired for more than six months, but a tab on it indicted it was current. 

As the two officers approached the car to investigate, Miller said, a group of people had formed and they were telling the young man not to cooperate with police. 

“You don’t have to say anything,” was one of the comments made, Miller reported. 

Miller said Libed tried to handcuff Stephens, but he wouldn’t cooperate and Libed could only help occasionally, because he had to hold the crowd of more than 10 people back at the same time. Within three minutes they had called for help. 

Gardner used his baton to bring the suspect under control, said Miller, and at one time in the fight Gardner went down to the ground with the suspect on top of him. 

Latisha Stephens was arrested on charges of physically interfering with police and for allegedly spitting on an officer. 

Alice Frazier, Keith’s grandmother, repeatedly waved the crowd forward toward the struggle, made anti-police remarks and urged her grandson to resist, the police department alleges. She was arrested on charges of inciting a riot. 

Two people in the crowd were arrested and Keith Stephens and Gardner were treated for injuries at Alta Bates Medical Center. 

Stephens mother, Patricia, said her son has held two jobs while in high school and he wants to be a firefighter. “Keith has so much he has to do and this does not make any sense,” she said. 

She said police pulled out the dashboard on her car, and she maintains they were looking for drugs. 

“This is a case of driving while black,” she said. “I feel he can have gold chains and a diamond earring If he works he can have those things without dealing drugs.” 

The family says they have hired civil rights attorney John Burris to defend Keith. 

Meredith Marran, a Berkeley author who is writing a book about Berkeley High School to be published by St. Martin’s Press in the fall, said this episode was not what she had in mind for her last chapter. 

For her book, “Class Dismissed, Senior Year in an American High School,” she followed the careers of three students - Jordan Etra, Autumn Morris and Keith Stephens - by sitting in classes with them for the last year, and getting to know their families. 

She said Keith is “academically challenged” but he has worked hard to overcome his academic difficulties, and he will be the first in a family of four children to attend college. 

Keith’s father, Kenneth Stephens Sr., a City of Berkeley refuse worker, said outside the court that he had old his son to be careful because with a dark complexion and wearing an earring he would stand out in the neighborhood below San Pablo Avenue. 

He mentioned police “stigmatizing that everyone is doing drugs. Not every young person down there is doing that.”