As viewers watched on live television, a man held his hands up and walked in front of a phalanx of police in Baltimore on Tuesday night, after a citywide curfew had started.
Seconds later, several officers in riot gear rushed out of their line and detained him, setting social media alight with questions about what happened to the man and why.
The incident unfolded live on CNN about 40 minutes after the 10 p.m. curfew went into effect and as authorities tried to prevent the kind of rioting — part of protests over the death of Freddie Gray — that plagued the city a night earlier.
The man was widely identified in news reports and social media as Joseph Kent, an activist and Morgan State University student. On Wednesday, the Baltimore Police Department told CNN that officers still were processing arrests from Tuesday night and did not have information to release on the identity of people they took into custody.
After the footage aired, people on Twitter made #JosephKent and #WhereIsJosephKent hot topics for hours.
The detention came minutes after a group of people — with the curfew already having started — faced off with police near the intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues. After objects appeared to have been thrown at the officers, police fired gas canisters, dispersing the crowd.
Roughly 15 minutes after that, a protester approached with his hands up. A Humvee came from behind the man and drove between him and CNN’s camera. Then at least four officers emerged from the line to detain the man.
Investigators made 10 arrests in Baltimore on Tuesday night, city Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said. Seven were for alleged curfew violations, he said.
A LinkedIn account for Joseph Kent says he works as an administrative assistant for Morgan State’s Entrepreneurial Development and Assistance Center. A woman who answered the phone at the center Wednesday said that no one was available to talk about Kent and that she’d have no further comment.
In November, the Baltimore City Paper ran a story featuring Kent, then 21, and his participation in Baltimore protests over a grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in the August shooting of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. He helped lead protesters who walked through campus and eventually to City Hall on November 25, the newspaper reported.
“Everyone knows me at Morgan already, organizing and making sure everything (is) running the correct way and peaceful and everything like that,” he said, according to the City Paper’s article. “So, everybody already knows I’m going to do things the right way, so when everybody else and community people and civilians and people who joined and saw that the Morgan students were looking up to it, before you knew it, the whole city was on my back and I was just carrying the whole city.”