a man of Ohio who was handcuffed and left face down on the floor of a social club last week died in police custody, and the officers involved are being investigated.
Police body camera footage released Wednesday shows a police officer from Cant responding to a report of a traffic accident and finding Frank Tysona 53-year-old resident of eastern Canton, in a bar near a club American Veteranso AMVETS.
The officer’s body camera footage Beau Schoenegge show that after a witness who was passing by at the time of the accident directed police toward the bar, a woman opened the door and said, “Please get him out of here right now.”
Police grabbed Tyson, who resisted being handcuffed, and repeatedly said, “They’re trying to kill me” and “Call the sheriff,” as they took him to the ground.
They pinned him down with a knee in his back, and he immediately told the officers that he couldn’t breathe. A recent Associated Press investigation found that those words – “I can’t breathe” – had been ignored in other cases of deaths in police custody.
The officers told Tyson that he was fine, to calm down and stop fighting while he was face down with his legs crossed on the ground. The police joked with passersby and flipped through Tyson’s wallet before realizing he was going through a medical crisis.
Five minutes after body camera footage recorded Tyson saying “I can’t breathe,” one officer asked another if Tyson had calmed down. The other answered: “Maybe he is dead.”
Tyson’s telling officers he couldn’t breathe is reminiscent of the events that preceded the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020. According to the police department, the two officers from the Canton Police Department’s traffic bureau who are being investigated, Schoenegge and Camden Burch, are white.
Tyson did not move when an officer told him to stand up and tried to turn him around. They shook him and checked his pulse. Minutes later, an officer said medics needed to “intensify their efforts” because Tyson was unresponsive and the officer wasn’t sure he could feel a pulse. Officers began CPR.
The Canton police report on Tyson’s death issued Friday said that “shortly after securing him,” officers “recognized that Tyson had become unresponsive” and that CPR was performed. Doses of Narcan before the doctors arrived. Tyson was pronounced dead at a hospital less than an hour later.
The chief investigator Harry Campbell The Stark County Coroner’s Office said Thursday that an autopsy was performed earlier in the week and that Tyson’s remains were turned over to a funeral home.
Frank Tyson was released from state prison on April 6 after serving 24 years in a kidnapping and robbery case and was almost immediately declared in violation of post-release control supervision for failing to appear before a parole officer, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. .
The Ohio Attorney General’s Office of Criminal Investigation said in a statement Thursday that its investigation will not determine whether the force was justified and that the prosecutor or a grand jury will decide whether charges related to the use of force are justified.
The mayor of Canton, William V. Sherer II, said he expressed his condolences to Frank Tyson’s family in person. “As we move through this difficult time, my goal is to be as transparent as possible with the community,” Sherer said in a statement released Wednesday.
He Justice Department The United States has warned police officers since the mid-1990s to move suspects face down as soon as they are handcuffed due to the danger of positional asphyxiation.
Many law enforcement experts agree that someone can stop breathing if held on the chest for too long or with too much weight because it can compress the lungs and put pressure on the heart. But when done correctly, turning someone upside down is not life-threatening.
An investigation led by The Associated Press published in March found that more than 1,000 people died more than a decade after police subdued them by non-lethal means, including face-down restraints.