A Westbrook woman is facing assault charges after an altercation with a 17-year-old flying a drone at Hammonasset State Park last month. (Published Monday, June 9, 2014) 
 
 A woman in Westbrook, Connecticut, is facing assault charges after an altercation with a 17-year-old flying a drone at Hammonasset State Park last month. 
 
 Andrea Mears, 23, is accused of assaulting Austin Haughwout on May 12 after she noticed Haughwout was flying a quad copter with a camera attached over the Middle Beach at Hammonasset in Madison. 
 
 Haughwout captured the alleged assault on video using his phone. 
 
 "Can someone call the cops? I'm being assaulted," Haughwout can be heard saying on the video. 
 
 The video appears to show Mears allegedly grabbing Haughwout's face and ripping his shirt. 
 
 "Maybe you shouldn't be taking pictures of people on the beach," Mears says on the video. 
 
 Mears called police first to report the teen using the drone over the beach. 
 
 NBC Connecticut spoke with Mears on Monday and she claimed Haughwout assaulted her first and that he edited and manipulated the video to make it appear she was the aggressor. 
 
 Houghwout told NBC Connecticut that Mears attacked him and he was trying to protect himself. 
 
 "I was just holding her away so she couldn't cause severe injuries to me," Haughwout said. 
 
 Mears was charged with third-degree assault and breach of peace. She appeared in court on May 28. ||||| A screenshot from a video posted to LiveLeak is alleged to show a woman who was charged with assault by state DEEP police after they said she attacked a teen who was flying a drone at Hammonasset Beach State Park in May. 
 
 MADISON >> A video appearing to show a Westbrook woman assaulting a teenager at Hammonasset Beach State Park last month went viral this past weekend after being posted online Friday. 
 
 State authorities say the woman seen in the video is facing charges stemming from the incident. 
 
 State Department of Energy and Environmental Protection police, who patrol the park, arrested 23-year-old Andrea L. Mears of Worthington Drive in Westbrook, after the incident on May 12. 
 
 According to a police report obtained by the Register on Monday, she was charged with third-degree assault and breach of peace. State judicial records show that Mears is to appear in Superior Court in New Haven on June 19. 
 
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 The 2-minute video was posted Saturday to the website Photography is Not a Crime. 
 
 The video was then the subject of a post on the social-networking site Reddit and by Monday morning was getting widespread Internet attention. 
 
 In the video, a woman can be seen talking on a phone while telling a teenage boy to stop working with some electronic equipment in a parking lot at the state beach. She also appears to be holding part of the equipment down. 
 
 “He’s taking pictures of people on the beach with a helicopter plane,” the woman says into the phone. 
 
 The woman then appears to attack the teenager. 
 
 “You’re assaulting me, you [expletive]” the teenager yells as the two struggle. 
 
 “Yeah, that’s right, leave you little pervert!” the woman says. She can be seen grabbing and hanging onto the boy’s blue shirt, which appears to tear apart. She appears to strike him multiple times with her hands. 
 
 “I’m going to beat your ass,” the woman says as the teenager yells for help and the struggle continues. 
 
 When reached by phone Monday afternoon, the 17-year-old victim said that he had been using a “quadcopter” with a GoPro camera attached to it. The teenager said his camera was gathering footage of the landscape and was more than 50 feet in the air for most of its flight time. 
 
 The victim said he had flown the device four times before Mears approached him in an “aggressive” manner and took a picture of him. He also said she tried to take the battery out of his equipment. 
 
 He said he wasn’t seriously injured in the encounter, suffering only scrapes to his elbows and hands, but that he was worried that his electronics might have been damaged. He said that he found later that they weren’t. 
 
 The teen said he’s been flying electronic aircraft since the age of 9 and that he’s had this piece of equipment since September. 
 
 Normally, he said, he gets a very positive response from people who are interested in the aircraft and want to use one of their own. 
 
 Mears did not return calls for comment Monday. 
 
 In the DEEP police report, an officer said that he was told Mears had called authorities asking for an officer about 4:05 p.m. May 12. She reportedly said that a remote-controlled aircraft was being flown over the beach with a camera on it. 
 
 The DEEP police officer said he tried to call Mears back but couldn’t reach her. 
 
 A short time later, dispatchers told the officer that the teenage victim had called police to report that he had been assaulted by Mears. Then Mears called the officer back. 
 
 That officer and another DEEP officer arrived at the beach a few minutes later, along with two Madison police sergeants and Madison paramedics. Mears was charged and released on a summons. The DEEP officer who wrote the report concluded that though the teenager “may have hit Mears at some point in the incident, it appeared to be while he was defending himself and attempting to get away from her attack.” 
 
 Both Mears and the victim gave police written statements about the incident. Police also secured the iPhone video as evidence.
– A woman who appeared to believe that assaulting a teenager was somehow less illegal than flying a camera-equipped drone over a beach has been charged in an attack captured on video. "He's taking pictures of people on the beach with a helicopter plane," a woman identified as Andrea Mears, 23, says into her phone before allegedly attacking the 17-year-old boy, grabbing his face, calling him a "pervert," and ripping his shirt, the New Haven Register reports. His video of the incident went viral after it was posted on LiveLeak. The Westbrook, Conn., teen says he was using a quad copter with a camera attached to film the landscape from 50 feet up and has been flying electronic aircraft since he was 9 years old. Mears—who called the police about the teen's drone use—claims he assaulted her first and he edited the video to make her look like the aggressor. He says he was just trying to protect himself. "I was just holding her away so she couldn't cause severe injuries to me," he tells NBC. Mears has been charged with breach of the peace and third-degree assault.