Officers responsible for dehydrating a mentally ill man to death in a prison cell were sentenced this week and received an insultingly low five-day jail term.
The post Officers Sentenced to Only 5 Days in Jail for Dehydrating Man to DEATH and Covering It Up appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Disturbing footage has just been released showing the horrific torture of a mentally ill man who was strapped in a restraint chair for two days before he was left naked on the floor to die as officers laughed.
The post WATCH: Cops Torture Mentally Ill Man in Restraint Chair for 2 Days, Laugh as He Dies in Front of Them appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Denver cops want to use a deeply disturbing video of them killing a man, which was the impetus behind the suspensions given to several officers, for training.
Parents of a mentally ill man who was beaten, tasered, and suffocated to death by police are finally getting closure in their battle to seek justice.
Grants, N.M. — Horrifying video, exposed through a new lawsuit shows an inmate begging to be taken to the hospital as he violently throws up blood — all the while, prison officers stand by and simply watch him die.
For seven hours, Douglas Edminsten writhed in agony as blood spewed from his mouth. Instead of getting the dying man the help he was begging for, prison officers sadistically stood by and watched him die.
“It made me sick to my stomach,” said attorney Glenn Valdez, after seeing the video for the first time. “I’m watching somebody die right in front of my eyes.”
As KOB reports, Edminsten suffered for seven hours, and at some points he appeared to be unconscious. The other inmates were so scared for him that they read Bible passages and even formed a prayer circle.
“We know the inmates and everyone else were trying to get help, but nothing happened,” Valdez said. “He couldn’t call himself or do anything that we take for granted. So without the guards to call, he’s dead.”
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When an autopsy was conducted, examiners found that Edminsten had a ruptured blood vessel in his stomach which led to his death. According to the report, his abdomen was full of blood. Had the jail officers taken him to the hospital when he asked for them to, he would’ve had an 80 percent chance of living.
What’s more, Valdez says that prison officers allowed Edminsten to die so that they didn’t have to pay the medical expense of bringing him to a doctor.
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“I think it was a financial decision that they didn’t want to pay to take him to a hospital,” he said.
According to KOB, because of the pending litigation, county officials weren’t able to say much about the incident when KOB reached out for comment. They did say that policies at the jail were being reviewed, but there have been no changes yet.
The Cibola County manager also said was an external investigation of Edminsten’s death, but he would not reveal the conclusions of that.
As Valdez notes, he was not like someone on the outside of prison. Edminsten couldn’t simply call 911 and get help. Instead, he was at the mercy of the Cibola County jail guards — and they showed no mercy.
Edminsten’s death is not an isolated incident. In-custody deaths are an all too often tragic occurrence.
Only 48 hours after he made a Facebook post thanking God for his kids, a 35-year-old father of four, Michael Sabbie, died in a concrete cage. His last moments alive were caught on a jail’s surveillance cameras as he uttered the all-too-familiar phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ — 19 times — as cops ignored him.
Somer Nunnally, a mother of two, was arrested on suspicion of DUI in May of 2015. She had ingested some pills and had a bad reaction to them. She was then booked into the Mississippi County jail where she would die a slow and humiliating death — all as guards watched and laughed for their own amusement
Neither Nunnally nor Sabbie had been convicted of a crime. In fact, according to a report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an overwhelming amount of inmates who die in police custody haven’t been convicted of a crime.
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An alarming 75% of the people who die behind bars actually have not been convicted of a crime.
As we have seen with the cases of Sandra Bland, Rexdale Henry, Sarah Circle Bear, and others, many of the deaths that occur in prison happen under extremely suspicious circumstances and are labeled as “suicides” without proper investigation.
As the video above illustrates, the problem doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
Ward County, ND — On average in the United States, roughly a dozen inmates die every day. Many of these human beings have never been convicted of a crime and were merely awaiting trial. Their causes of death range from being boiled to death to being severely dehydrated or choked and crushed to death. Dustin Irwin, 25, is one of those deaths.
After having been arrested by a Ward County Deputy on charges of driving under suspicion, Irwin was booked into the Ward County Jail where, days later, he would die a horrid death. His death the became the subject of a North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DOC) investigation.
Dashcam video of the arrest, obtained by the Minot Daily News, showed that Irwin was calm and courteous during the traffic stop.
However, after being booked into jail, Irwin became gravely ill. Just 12 hours after being booked, Irwin submitted a written request to go to the hospital.
Irwin wrote, “Please I’m really sick and need to see someone at the hospital. Please help me see someone.”
He knew something was very wrong. But deputies didn’t believe him. The on-duty sergeant at the jail thought Irwin was detoxing so he simply moved him to a different cell instead of seeking medical help.
It is important to note that inmates often fake being sick. However, the disturbing events that unfolded in Irwin’s cell over the next 48 hours were far beyond the realm of faking an illness.
Video from the cell shows Irwin vomiting, defecating, flailing, and in a constant state of torment for hours on end. The constant distress eventually caused Irwin to become unresponsive, so his cellmate pressed the emergency button in the cell.
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A deputy came into the cell — not a doctor — rolled back Irwin’s eyelids and administered a sternum rub. A sternum rub is a means of testing if a person is faking an unconscious state by using one’s knuckles to inflict a significant amount of pain to that person’s sternum. Irwin barely responded.
Dr. John J. Hagan, a board certified internist in Bismarck, concluded, according to the Minot Daily News, that “a properly trained correctional officer should have been able to recognize that Irwin should receive medical attention” and that “had he been evaluated at this point, he would likely have received a short course of IV fluids in the emergency room and would have been returned to the jail.” Hagan’s opinion noted that “regardless of medical training or corrections training” a reasonable individual would conclude Irwin was seriously ill and that “he required immediate medical attention.”
However, the deputies did not reach this conclusion and they left him in the cell once again.
Day 3. By this point, Irwin has become delirious and is unable to do anything but vomit and shake. Officers finally respond but not to get him medical help. Irwin was simply being exchanged for another inmate.
The disturbing video shows that Irwin was entirely unresponsive at this point. However, deputies loaded him up and prepared him for the exchange. The seat in the transport vehicle had to be covered in plastic because Irwin had been urinating and vomiting on himself for days.
According to MDN, Irwin could only “be described as very seriously ill,” wrote Dr. Hagan, after viewing video of Irwin being prepared for transport at the Ward County Jail. “He was hallucinating, incoherent, unable to follow simple instructions or to walk without assistance. A disinterested bystander would recognize that Irwin was gravely ill. Immediate treatment offered reasonable hope of survival even at this juncture. His best opportunity for survival and recovery was lost when the transport driver chose not to turn left into the emergency room entrance to Trinity upon leaving the jail.”
Again, the deputies ignored him.
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Not until Irwin was brought to the inmate exchange in Coleharbor did any of the deputies who viewed this seriously ill man say a single word.
Burleigh County Deputy Jennifer Heinert was the first person to show an ounce of humanity and notice that something was very wrong. Heinert told the DOC investigator that “as soon as she observed Irwin, she knew his condition was a medical condition” and that her immediate reaction was “to get Irwin to a hospital.”
By the time Irwin made it to the hospital, his condition had deteriorated that much more. He was then airlifted to Sanford Health in Fargo but went into ventricular fibrillation during the flight and died. He was returned to Bismarck where he was pronounced dead.
Dr. Hagan concluded in his report noting that “With reasonable medical certainty, I conclude that Dustin Irwin’s death was caused by profound dehydration. The combination of delirium accompanied by increased agitation is called excited delirium. Without appropriate medical intervention, this sequence of events will lead to death. Deputy Heinert appears to be the only individual who made the correct assessment and took prompt and appropriate action in this matter.”
The DOC investigation went further, concluding that “it is evident that those incarcerated at the Ward County Jail were not being properly supervised.” The DOC’s issued an Order of Non-Compliance to the Ward County Jail, calling Irwin’s treatment “grossly inadequate” and noting that “Every level of command within the Ward County Sheriff’s office failed to provide adequate care to inmate Dustin Irwin.”
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Charges were eventually filed against Capt. Mike Nason and Sheriff Steve Kukowski. However, they were almost immediately dropped. For the gross negligence and dereliction leading to the horrific suffering and death of another human being, no one was held liable. Instead, Kukowski convinced the Ward County Commissioners to pay him a $75,000 settlement.
Reno, NV — Surveillance footage, released to the Reno Gazette-Journal through a public records request, shows the terrifying final moments of 35-year-old Justin Thompson, a man in the midst of a mental breakdown. For 30 minutes, nearly a dozen Washoe County Sheriff’s deputies took turns kicking, tasering, insulting, and crushing the wind from Thompson — who noted multiple times that he could not breathe through the spit mask over his head. After the seeing the video, Thompson’s parents are now suing the county for the wrongful death of their son.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court last Friday and it asks the county to pay wrongful death damages, the cost of Thompson’s funeral, and other damages.
As RGJ reports, Peter Goldstein, the lawyer representing Thompson’s parents, claims in the lawsuit that Thompson was no danger because he had been medicated at the hospital, making him docile. Goldstein also said deputies ignored Thompson’s repeated warnings that he could not breathe.
“As seen in the video, the staff and deputies of the jail kicked, kneeled upon, burked and applied torturous arm bar holds, and refused plaintiff’s pleas for help,” he wrote. “When decedent stated he could not breathe, they did not provide any help or even begin to appreciate the level of danger and harm decedent was experiencing.”
The lawsuit notes the severe injuries incurred by Thompson, including a broken rib, and cuts and bruises all over his body.
The suit also alleges that the sheriff’s office has no policy or training in place to teach deputies on how to deal with inmates who may “lack the capacity to understand the consequences of their actions” due to a mental illness or altered mental state.
According to RGJ, this is the second lawsuit of its kind to hit the county after a two-year spike in deaths was uncovered by the paper’s investigation.
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The Washoe County Medical Examiner has since listed Thompson’s cause of death as a homicide — due to complications of physical restraint.
The tragic incident began to unfold on August 3, 2016, when Thompson was arrested. His family and girlfriend reported that Thompson is bipolar and had been off his medication for some time. During the bipolar episode, Thompson, who has no previous criminal record, was arrested on charges of domestic battery.
The clearly distressed man exhibited severe signs of mental distress and was unable to be booked, so he was placed in a holding cell. For hours after being arrested, Thompson jammed his fingers into his ears. He paced, clutched his head and stuffed toilet paper into his ears. He spent hours on the floor curled up in the fetal position before peeling off his scabby skin to use his own blood to draw on the floor, walls, and camera.
Heavily armored deputies in riot gear then raided Thompson’s cell to drag him out.
Instead of admitting him for psychiatric treatment, Thompson was brought to the hospital and given an injection of Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic drug, and Benadryl, before being sent back to jail.
When bringing him back to jail, Thompson appeared docile until a deputy grabs his face while trying to take a mugshot and shoves it to the side. Thompson, whose arms were chained to his waist, became agitated, slipped out onto the floor and a struggle began.
“How’s this? Does this feel good,” a deputy says as Thompson appears to lie still, his wrists still chained to his belly.
In their attempt to get the mentally ill man in the stretcher to bring him to the hospital, more than a half-dozen deputies took turns kneeling on, kicking, tasering, and insulting him. Yet for 30 minutes, the swarm of officers was unable to subdue the single man.
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When Thompson complains that he can’t breathe, a deputy can be heard answering back, “No, you’re not being compliant, Justin. We could’ve just rolled you through the process but you’re being a d**k about the whole thing.”
As the deputies continue to increase pressure on him, both mentally and physically, Thompson becomes more distressed.
“So now we are to this level and you’re going to get carried in a little wrap because you can’t maintain enough thought to go through this process like a man,” the deputy says. “If you hurt my staff, you are going to catch a felony. Understand? We are not going to get injured by you. And if you lash out, I am going to make sure that you remember it.”
For the next 25 minutes, the video shows deputies slowly squeeze the air from Thompson’s lungs until he finally stopped breathing.
Thompson was brought to the hospital where he was put on life support with no brain activity. For five days, no one even told his family where he was.
When Karen Thompson, Justin’s mother called the jail she signed up for automatic text notifications on inmates. On August 7, she received a message saying her son had been released.
They looked for Thompson for over two days.
“I’m frantically calling people,” she said. “I called his girlfriend. She had got the note, too, but hadn’t heard from him. So, we’re calling what friends we had numbers for. I was preparing to drive up there and drive the streets to look for him. We didn’t know what had happened to him.”
But Thompson was not free, he was in a hospital bed — brain dead.
“On Tuesday afternoon — the 9th of August — I have a sheriff’s officer here in Kern County that comes in and tells me that my son had passed away and told me he had died of a massive heart attack,” Karen Thompson said.
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Thompson described her son as a caring man who she has never seen act like the person in the surveillance footage.
“Everybody always talked about how he helped them,” she said. “He was always caring for other people.”
As the Reno Gazette-Journal reported, Sheriff Chuck Allen even took the unusual step of criticizing the deputies’ handling of the struggle before the internal investigation was complete, after he reviewed the videos obtained by the Reno Gazette-Journal through a public records request.
“I believe anyone who watches this video will understand why I was concerned about the handling of this incident and why I immediately called for an outside investigation,” he said in a written statement.
“I further, and firmly, believe that some of the actions shown do not reflect the standards of the men and women who work for the Sheriff’s Office. Nor are they in keeping with my often-expressed expectation that employees from this office will always treat the public we serve with fairness, equality and respect.”
Unlike previous in-custody restraint deaths caught on camera at the jail, Thompson was not high on methamphetamine. His stress was induced by deputies, not drugs, and the medical examiner agrees.
As RGJ reports, Sparks police concluded an independent investigation into Thompson’s death in February and found no criminal wrongdoing by the sheriff’s office.
This lawsuit is now the only means of justice Justin Thompson’s parents have.
Below is that horrifying video.
This is two hours of footage from the Washoe Co. Jail showing the entire struggle that led to Justin Thompson’s death. The struggle begins at timestamp 7:44. The struggle intensifies at 24:53. Deputies start life-saving efforts at 41:30. At the 1:28:30 mark, you can see the attack from a more damning angle.
Only 48 hours after he made a Facebook post thanking God for his kids, a 35-year-old father of four, Michael Sabbie, would die in a concrete cage. His last moments alive were caught on a jail’s surveillance cameras as he uttered the all-too-familiar phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ — 19 times.
As none of the officers involved in his death have been held accountable, his family has filed a lawsuit this week to seek some semblance of justice.
“He is a medically-vulnerable person. So he reported at intake that he had hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and asthma,” said Erik Heipt, who is representing Sabbie’s family in the lawsuit against the jail filed earlier this week, according to CBS.
The lawsuit claims what the video shows — officers ignored his pleas for help, his clear signs of distress, his labored breathing, and used excessive force — leading to the death of this father.
In 2015, Sabbie was violently subdued and repeatedly pepper sprayed by guards at the Bi State Prison on the borders of Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. He’d been arrested after a verbal dispute with his wife.
As the assault on this father began, five officers swarmed Sabbie and piled on top of him as he shouted, “I can’t breathe.” Then, a sixth guard, equipped with a body camera, joined the group and began spraying Sabbie in the face while accusing him of resisting.
“Get your hands behind your back or you’ll get it again!” the guard yelled.
“I can’t breathe, sir,” Sabbie said, as officers propped him up against the wall outside of the nurse’s office. “Please, please. I got pneumonia.”
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The nurse examined him and then released him, noting that his symptoms were normal for someone who’d just been pepper sprayed. However, Sabbie had those symptoms before he was sprayed.
“Please, please,” Sabbie begged for water, but was denied. He was then brought to the shower to wash off the spray and thrown in his cell.
The guards then said Sabbie had attacked one of them after refusing to go back to his cell. Yet his family’s attorney, Erik Heipt, told Huffington Post that Sabbie had complained “I can’t breathe” 19 different times in the nine total minutes of video obtained by the family. And, the video shows no such attack.
“If you just looked at the cause of death, you would think that Michael died of some sort of hypertensive heart condition, and that may be true,” Heipt said. “But if we didn’t have a video, we’d never know that he had been begging for help due to his shortness of breath and inability to breathe.”
According to jail protocol, somebody was supposed to check on Sabbie every 30 minutes overnight, according to CBS. The suit claims that a guard said she did and then later admitted to lying.
Hours after he was left to die in his cell while begging for help, Sabbie was found dead.
Medical examiners ruled Sabbie’s cause of death as “hypertensive arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.” They claim the pepper spray in the face and the violent beating “played a minimal role in the decedent’s death, and may not have contributed at all to his death.”
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Heipt told Huffington Post the family believes Sabbie died from a treatable and recognizable medical emergency called a pulmonary edema, which is excess fluid in the lungs due to his heart condition. Sabbie had said he was spitting blood and needed to go to a hospital in court, where a judge set his bail at $2,500 for the misdemeanor domestic assault charge.
Police said Sabbie threatened his wife during a fight over monetary issues, but he pleaded not guilty and his wife even said that this was “a tragedy that should never have happened.”
“I can’t put into words how devastated my children and I are after the loss of Michael,” she said. “He was my backbone and best friend. My children lost a wonderful father who wanted the best for his family. A piece of our heart is gone, and I pray to God for justice.”
Sabbie’s death is not an isolated incident. And, according to a report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an overwhelming amount of inmates who die in police custody haven’t been convicted of a crime.
In fact, an alarming 75% of the people who die behind bars actually have not been convicted of a crime.
As we have seen with the cases of Sandra Bland, Rexdale Henry, Sarah Circle Bear, and others, many of the deaths that occur in prison happen under extremely suspicious circumstances and are labeled as “suicides” without proper investigation.
“He was treated as if his life did not matter,” Sabbie’s family said. “Most of all they want justice and accountability and to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
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According to a new lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Corrections, multiple corrections officers made jokes about the potential of an inmate killing herself and even made bets that she would. Sadly, 25-year-old Janika Edmond did end up killing herself, and one of the corrections officers ended up winning lunch, a subway sandwich.
Edmond had a history of depression and suicide attempts, and she allegedly announced to the prison guards that she was going to kill herself, but was ignored by the guards as people in her position often are. The lawsuit states that everyone in the prison was well aware of her condition, considering that she had attempted suicide or requested to be put on suicide watch 8 times in 13 months.
Her mental health was such a concern prison doctors ordered she receive certain treatments for her depression, and that she be kept under a close watch in case she ended up attempting suicide, or even talked about it.
However, for some reason, police never called prison doctors or any authorities when Edmond acted out and then threatened to kill herself. The officers took her and isolated her in a shower area, threatening to take her to solitary confinement. When she asked for a suicide-prevention vest, her cries for help were ignored.
At this point, the lawsuit alleges that video footage at the prison, shows the guards walking away and leaving her alone in the shower area, taking bets as to whether she was going to kill herself or not. Just minutes later, Edmon did in fact attempt suicide by hanging herself with a bra, and when Edmon’s unconscious body was found, Officer Dianna Callahan was seen pumping her fists in the air in celebration, shouting “Somebody owes me lunch!”
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Allegedly, Callahan had made a bet with fellow officer Kory Moore about whether or not the woman would go through with it.
According to the lawsuit, “Upon information and belief, Callahan made a bet with Moore that Edmond would become suicidal.”
To make matters even more disturbing, choking noises and commotion can be heard very clearly in the video, and the officers were in earshot, meaning they could have potentially ignored what was going on, even knowing that an inmate was attempting suicide.
Eventually, she was taken to a hospital where she was declared brain dead, and she lost her life four days later.
It also seems that there was potentially an attempted cover-up after the suicide attempt. Edmond’s mother came by the prison to visit less than an hour after the incident, and she was turned away and told that her daughter was not accepting visitors. However, they did not inform the family about the suicide attempt. In fact, the family was not informed until the following day.
Michigan Department of Corrections spokesperson Chris Gautz gave the following lame excuse for not informing the family of the incident.
“In this case, the prisoner had chosen not to list her biological family in her emergency contacts. We respected her wishes,” Gautz told The Daily Beast.
Surprisingly, even before the lawsuit surfaced, the prison fired both of the officers in question, and Callahan is actually facing charges of involuntary manslaughter. Despite being terminated and facing these charges, Callahan was able to get her job back by lobbying through the police union.
