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‘Call If and When There Is a Time of Death’: NC Jail Staffers Accused of Ignoring Signs Black Man Was In Distress, Displaying Callousness Before His Death, Lawsuit Says
Niara Savage |
October 5, 2021

A lawsuit filed on Sept. 28 by the family of a man who died following his detention at a North Carolina jail blames jail staffers and detention officers for his death.

John Neville, a 56-year-old father of five, stopped breathing at the Forsyth County Jail in December 2019 while he was being held for a pending assault charge. He was transferred to a hospital and died two days later.

Neville’s son, Sean Neville, recently filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina. The suit alleges Neville’s death was caused by jail staffers pinning him in a prone position, and that detention officers repeatedly ignored signs he was in medical distress.


John Neville died after being restrained at a North Carolina jail in December 2019. (Photo: Forsyth County Jail video screenshot)
The suit makes reference to a note left by a captain with the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office for medical personnel at the hospital after Neville arrived there, which reads, “Call if and when there is a time of death and if an autopsy is performed. We need to know yes or no. Thank you.”

“The callousness of this note demonstrates that correctional defendants were more concerned with the potential fallout from their treatment of Mr. Neville than they were for Mr. Neville’s wellbeing,” the lawsuit said.

A judge released 40 minutes footage of staffers’ encounter with Neville last year. After Neville reportedly fell from a top bunk bed to a concrete floor, nurses and detention officers responded to the emergency.

Neville was in the floor in a seizure-like state, sweating and had blood in his mouth. He became agitated as a nurse tried to take his blood pressure and cried out and officers tried to restrain him using their body weight.

“Because Mr. Neville was unable to comply with the officers’ commands, they placed him in a prone restraint (similar to a hogtie) for a significant period of time, which impaired his respiratory and cardiac systems to the point that he had to be revived multiple times,” according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by Atlanta Black Star.

A spit mask was placed over Neville‘s face and he was transferred to another room in a restraint chair. In the observation cell, he was pinned to the mattress and restrained by five officers as he pleaded for help and repeated that he couldn’t breathe.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe, please!” Neville said at one point.

“You’re breathing, because you’re talking, you’re yelling, you’re moving,” an officer replied. Footage shows Neville said he could not breathe dozens of times while he was pinned to the ground.



https://atlantablackstar.com/2021/10/05 ... suit-says/

Dayton police investigate after video shows disabled man pulled from car by officers

By Parker Perry, Dayton Daily News
Oct 5, 2021

Body camera footage shows the interaction between Dayton police officers and a paraplegic man who would not exit his vehicle during a traffic stop and was yanked from the car and onto the road.

Clifford Owensby, the man pulled from his vehicle during a traffic stop Thursday, told the Dayton Daily News Monday afternoon that he felt helpless as officers put him on the ground, handcuffed him and then placed him into the back of a cruiser. The incident took place in the 1200 block of West Grand Avenue, according to a report.

Owensby, who said he does not have use of his legs, said he was injured during the incident, having sustained scrapes from the pavement and is still in pain. He also said that a previous back injury was reinjured.



https://www.daytondailynews.com/crime/d ... GPEGKBXRM/

Mona Rodriguez was fighting with a 15-year-old girl one afternoon late last month about a block from a Long Beach, Calif., high school when a police officer who was driving by stopped and tried to break up the scrap by threatening to pepper-spray them.

The de-escalation tactic worked. The two stopped.

Then, Rodriguez got into the front passenger seat of a gray car driven by her boyfriend. Bystander video shows the school safety officer, Eddie F. Gonzalez, put his hands on the passenger side and shouted “Hey!” while the four-door sedan peeled out. As the car passed him, Gonzalez fired twice.

One of the bullets hit Rodriguez in the head, leaving the 18-year-old mother brain-dead.

Over the next week and a half, an uproar grew as Rodriguez clung to life at a hospital. The city’s mayor called the shooting “horrific and tragic.” Her family called on prosecutors to criminally charge the officer and, through a lawyer, pushed the California attorney general to open his own investigation.

On Tuesday, eight days after the shooting, Rodriguez died when her family took her off life support. The next evening, the Long Beach Unified School District’s board voted unanimously to fire Gonzalez, who had been hired in January after short stints at several police departments, saying he violated the district’s use-of-force policy. A district spokesperson told CNN that Rodriguez was not a student in the district but had been previously.

On Thursday, Long Beach Police Department detectives opened a homicide investigation, noting Gonzalez was employed by the school district, not the city. Police will pass their findings to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to charge the officer and with what, a department spokeswoman told The Washington Post.


The district’s use-of-force policy, obtained by The Post, allows officers to fire their guns only in self-defense or to prevent the death or “great bodily injury” of another. It forbids them from firing at someone who is fleeing, toward a moving vehicle or through a vehicle window, unless circumstances “clearly warrant the use of a firearm as a final means of defense.”

Board members decided those leading to Rodriguez’s death didn’t.


Cheryl Dorsey, a retired Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, told CNN she watched the bystander video of the shooting and agreed that the actions were not justified under police policy.

“There is no imminent threat to that officer or anyone else as they’re seated in a vehicle and driving away. Get a license plate number — there were so many other options tactically available.”

RTH10260 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 09, 2021 9:54 am From what I read earlier, this guy was only school officer, not full fleged police officer. My guess is he did not have jurisdiction on public grounds. Breaking up a fight might be sensible, but any interactions after that seems to me to be unlawful. From what I have read the locals are furious that the guy only got sent home with paid leave and was not immediatly arrested.

Rodriguez was shot by Long Beach Unified School District school safety officer Eddie F. Gonzalez as her boyfriend drove her away from an alleged altercation with a student at a parking lot near Millikan High School. Police had initially said Rodriguez was shot in the upper body but her family maintained that she was struck in the back of the head.

“I was told that the bullet used was a hollow-type point bullet,” Rodriguez’s oldest brother, Iran Rodriguez, told ABC 7. “On impact, it exploded inside her brain and shards of metal bounced inside her head.”

Gonzalez has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the Long Beach Police Department and the District Attorney’s office, but Rodriguez’s family says she was unarmed and want him charged with murder.

“This school safety officer decided he was going to be the judge, jury and the executioner,” Mona’s other brother, Omar Rodriguez, told the station.

School safety officers like Gonzalez are hired by LBUSD and carry firearms, but they do not make arrests or investigate crimes. Gonzalez, however, had served two stints as a real cop before the school district hired him in January, 2021—and both jobs are notable for how quickly they ended.

As the Long Beach Post reports, Gonzalez was a full-fledged police officer in Los Alamitos from January 8, 2019 to April 8, 2019. During his induction, the Chief of Police there said Gonzalez had served in the U.S. Marines and had spent 24 years working for Time Warner Cable as an abuse investigator before he was laid off.

Next, Gonzalez joined the Sierra Madre police force in Los Angeles County in September 2019 and left that job in July 2020.

Gonzalez also graduated from the Orange County Sheriff Department’s regional training academy as a reserve deputy in 2015, and was named reserve deputy of the year in 2018.

The city of Los Alamitos would not tell the Post why Gonzalez left the department, citing confidentiality, and Sierra Madre declined to confirm whether he had ever been a peace officer there.

LBUSD spokesman Chris Eftychiou confirmed that the district knew about Gonzalez’s brief, previous law enforcement history and that those agencies were contacted during his vetting.

“Nothing in those checks was disqualifying,” Eftychiou said.

Uninformed wrote: ↑Sat Oct 09, 2021 2:26 pmWhen people without (or even with?) any direct connection to a premises, or perhaps the locale in question, arm themselves with guns (assuming this is allowed by the relevant federal/state/local laws) to “defend” that place against protesters/demonstrators/looters what right do they have to use those firearms unless their lives are in provable danger?

Jaleel Stallings shot at the MPD; a jury acquitted him of wrongdoing
BY: DEENA WINTER - SEPTEMBER 1, 2021 9:11 AM


Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great! F*** ’em up, gas ’em, f*** ’em up.”

Bittell turned to his SWAT unit in the van and said, “Alright, we’re rolling down Lake Street. The first f***ers we see, we’re just hammering ’em with 40s,” according to body camera footage described in court documents. He was referring to “less lethal” plastic projectiles sometimes called rubber bullets or 40mm launchers or rounds.

It was nighttime, just five days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Protests and riots had raged for days and laid waste to businesses along Lake Street and the Third Precinct police station. By May 30, protests had ebbed but a curfew was in effect.

At 17th Avenue and Lake Street, around 10 p.m., the SWAT team saw a group of people outside the Stop-N-Shop gas station. Bittell told the driver to head toward the station and said, “Let ’em have it boys!”

“Right there, get ’em, get ’em, get ’em, hit ’em, hit ’em!” he ordered as the officers fired their plastic bullet launchers without warning. They later learned they were shooting at the gas station owner, neighbors and relatives guarding the station from more looting, as well as bystanders, including a Vice News reporter who had his hands up and was yelling, “Press!”

A SWAT team member pushed the reporter to the ground, and as he lay there, with his press card up, another officer pepper sprayed him in the face.

About an hour later, three blocks to the west, they opened the sliding door of the van and began firing plastic rounds at people in a parking lot.

They hit Jaleel K. Stallings, 29, a St. Paul truck driver, who says he didn’t know they were cops because they were inside an unmarked white cargo van with the police lights off. He thought they were real bullets. And, he says he was mindful of warnings earlier that day from no less than Gov. Tim Walz that white supremacists were roaming the city looking for trouble.

Stallings, an Army veteran, returned fire with his mini Draco pistol, for which he had a permit. He aimed low, toward the front of the van, and didn’t hit anyone. When the SWAT team jumped out of the van yelling, “Shots fired!” Stallings realized they were police. So he dropped his weapon and lay face down on the pavement, according to court documents.

His eye socket was fractured in the beating that followed, with officers later claiming he resisted arrest.

A Hennepin County jury recently acquitted Stallings of all charges after he was allowed by a judge to claim self-defense.



https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/09/0 ... rongdoing/

An off-duty police officer, enraged at finding her girlfriend and another woman in bed together, shot them both Wednesday — killing the new woman in the relationship and wounding the girlfriend, police sources said.

The officer, Yvonne Wu, 31, who is assigned to the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn, opened fire on the lovers in a home at 19th Avenue near 80th Street in Bensonhurst just after 5 p.m., hitting both women in the chest, police sources said.

The officer’s girlfriend, 23, suffered a non-life-threatening wound; the other woman, 25, was critically injured and died of her injuries, sources said.

When one of the victims called 911, the operator could hear someone in the background saying, “That’s what you get,” sources tell the New York Daily News. The 911 caller identified herself as Jenny Li, the sources said.

Medics took both shooting victims, as well as a third patient, possibly the off-duty officer, to Maimonides Hospital.

The off-duty cop was in custody, police sources said.

Black man has a stroke, Boston police arrest him instead of calling an ambulance

On the night Copeland was arrested, he knew he was having some kind of medical emergency. His years of training and driving for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) prepared him, so he pulled his car over immediately. He parked in front of the famed Berklee College of Music and told WBUR, although he was afraid, he thought, “at least if anything happens to me, somebody will find me.”

When police found Copeland he was barely conscious, but instead of assuming he was ill, they filed a report claiming he was intoxicated and instead of calling an ambulance, they arrested him.

The night continued to become a nightmare for Copeland after he was taken to the police station. According to police records, while trying to use the bathroom in the holding cell, he fell and hit his head. Officers still did not offer him medical help, instead choosing to let him “sleep it off,” WBUR reports.

It was only after five hours and Copeland beginning to vomit that officers finally called an ambulance to take him to Tufts Medical Center, where the nightmare turned into a horror movie. While there, medical workers also assumed he was drunk and made the decision to leave him in the emergency room unattended for seven more hours.

► Show Spoiler

Boston has settled with the Copelands for $1.3 million, but the officers have not been disciplined even though the investigation ended over a year ago.

The Copelands never filed a lawsuit, the city of Boston simply settled with them after an attorney they’d hired contacted the city.

Although Tufts has apologized to the Copelands, the police department has never apologized or reached out to him or his family. And the physical damage is still quite significant.

Copeland spent weeks at Tufts and months at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. He was forced to leave his job with the MBTA, and both eating and walking remain a challenge.

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