Sitting alone in her car, Jen Dold was crying too hard to drive. She had just received a manila envelope with her brother’s autopsy report.
There it was, one devastating word: “accident.” The papers trembled in her hands.
Their mother had called 911 for help getting Dold’s 29-year-old brother, Alex, to the hospital because he was in a mental health crisis. Four sheriff’s deputies and two police officers shocked him with Tasers, wrapped an arm around his neck, punched and kicked him, then left him face down until they noticed he wasn’t breathing.
How could that be an accident? Dold was certain it was a homicide.
Angry and grieving in the parking lot outside the county medical examiner’s office 30 miles north of Seattle, Dold vowed to fight.
“No more silence or complacency,” she thought. “No sweeping it under the rug.”
In the United States, police rarely face criminal charges when civilians die after officers use physical force. Whether they do can depend on a system that operates after the initial attention passes: medical examiners and coroners who decide how and why someone died — what’s known as the manner and cause of death.
On TV dramas such as “CSI” or “Bones,” facts and established science determine whether a death was an accident or homicide. In reality, medical investigations involving police restraint deaths can be so riddled with inconsistencies, suspect science or conflicts of interest that even extensive force may matter little, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found.
That investigation identified 1,036 deaths over a decade after police used not their guns but physical blows, restraints or weapons such as Tasers that aren’t supposed to kill. Some people were causing little or no trouble, while others were committing violent crimes. Many died after officers broke widely known safety practices, or after medics injected them with powerful knock-out drugs, sometimes at the urging of police.
Accident was the most common conclusion of medical investigations in AP’s case database. Accidental rulings typically blamed preexisting conditions such as obesity or asthma, or drug use — even when in some cases blood testing did not detect lethal levels. Others faulted “excited delirium,” a controversial diagnosis discredited by major medical associations. Some medical officials based their decisions not on physical evidence, but instead on whether they believed police intended to kill.
Manner of death…
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