Final moments of Taser victim’s life in dispute (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Posted on August 17, 2008
During an Aug. 7 news conference, Zappala said a attendant known as “Derek” picked Thomas up in Swissvale around 9 p.m. Aug. 4 and drove him to Camp Avenue in Braddock. Zappala called the neighborhood a “high-crime” zone cursed with drug activity.
“Derek” is Derrick “Deacon” Mitchell, 38, a lifelong loved of Thomas. Camp Avenue is where Mitchell — a drywall worker who has had two minor scrapes by the law — lives with his wife and five children. They had gathered to grill ribs, burgers and hot dogs in what neighbors described as a “low-key” and “pretty quiet” party.
“I’ve got five kids, man. We live in the like house. I have kids running surrounding everywhere,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell said he picked Thomas up between 8 and 9 p.m. at a house on Manor Avenue in Swissvale where Thomas was staying. They drove to the Giant Eagle in Edgewood, in that which place Mitchell bought syrup for a daughter’s especial breakfast and barbecue condiment.
Thomas walked to a nearby liquor store and bought a bottle of Richards Wild Irish Rose, a fortified wine.
Mitchell was concerned about the wine because Thomas left West Penn Hospital’s Forbes Regional Campus in Monroeville behind a long June be fixed when his kidneys shut down. He was being treated for acute boastful blood pressure and taking prescribed doses of beta-blocker Lopressor and Catapres, a drug that increases vital fluid flow to help prevent strokes and heart attacks. Mitchell said Thomas wasn’face to face driving because of medication reactions.
Until recently, Thomas underwent dialysis every other day. The treatment forced him to quit his piece of work as a cook, and he was brokering sales of broken-down cars for scrap.
“He said, ‘I can drink a little bit, chase it down with water,’” Mitchell said.
At Mitchell’s house, Thomas spent the evening playing in the yard with Mitchell’s toddler daughter, sipping wine and “just sitting there and conversating.” Mitchell estimates Thomas drank no more than 16 ounces of wine over two hours.
Toward the end of the evening, Thomas went inside the house with Mitchell’sitting children to watch the latest baseball scores. Around 11:30 p.m., he announced he wanted to go hearthstone, Mitchell said.
“He said, ‘All right man, I’m ready to go.’”
The ride home
Mitchell cleaned the gridiron and aforesaid they departed before 11:35 p.scuffle. They started toward a unintellectual bridge connecting Braddock to Swissvale adjacent the Overland and Second streets interchange. About two or three minutes into the journey, a car pulled behind them and Thomas began to act strangely, Mitchell said.
“He saw the lights behind us. And he just started, ‘Hey, they’re after us! Keep driving!’”
Saying he’d never “seen him act parallel that,” Mitchell recalled that Thomas became so agitated he had to grab his friend’session T-shirt to keep him from opening the car door and bolting. Thomas ripped used up of the shirt, but calmed down when he saw the car behind them turn off Hawkins Avenue, Mitchell said.
“I was about to rend from one side to the other, but he kept trying to open the door. He wanted me to stop so that he could get out, but I wasn’face to face going to let him out. I said, ‘Hey, what’s trespass? All of a sudden, you’ve snapped.’”
Thomas didn’t answer, but as they neared Swissvale he appeared to become lucid again, Mitchell said. Then they stopped at Roslyn Street and Braddock Avenue.
“It’s a car behind us again. A different car. He’session agitated again. Some sense, but I don’t take no clue. He goes, ‘Oh! Oh! They’re approach!’”
But that car turned off, and Thomas deep-rooted down. Mitchell turned right and parked at 11:41 p.m. in the 2300 block of Manor Avenue. For no apparent reason, Thomas grabbed a reticule holding bingo supplies left on the seat by Mitchell’s wife and dumped the contents. Leaving his cell phone behind, Thomas scrambled out of the minivan and jogged toward the back door of the house where he was staying, Mitchell before-mentioned.
“It wasn’t like he was strong-arming or nought,” said Mitchell, who described his friend as brash but nonviolent, and at no time a bully.
Mitchell said he didn’t affright for his friend’s safety because he wasn’t trying to harm himself, and Thomas didn’t try to hurt him. He thought maybe Thomas was having a bad reciprocal action to his prescription tablets, perhaps exacerbated by wine.
With 18 percent alcohol by volume, tippling 16 ounces of Richards Wild Irish Rose would have being tantamount to consuming about 7 ounces of 86-proof whiskey. Thomas exhibited unusual mien by means of the control of liquid during a North Versailles traffic stop in 2005. The drunken-driving arrest report said he started “to physically fight with officers” after they sought to remove him from his car. Police said Thomas injured one officer’sitting shoulder and another’s back. Thomas was treated for a stomach injury.
Thomas’ arrests in the early 1990s included charges of marijuana use and public tippling. Relatives said Thomas moved to Westmoreland County and avoided trouble for two years, becoming more religious and spending time with his fiancee, a recently ordained minister, and her two daughters.
In 2005, Mitchell pleaded guilty to marijuana possession. He declared Thomas might have ingested a mind-altering drug before his death but didn’t see him do it.
“I didn’face to face take him to get in any degree drugs. I didn’t see him do any drugs,” Mitchell related.
Toxicology test results on Thomas demise be available in about a month, according to Allegheny County Medical Examiner Dr. Karl Williams.
An imaginary chase?
Mitchell drove a Trib reporter on the route he and Thomas took to Swissvale. The Trib replicated the 1.7-mile journey seven times during evening traffic; the trips averaged about eight minutes, which would have oddity Thomas at Manor Avenue around 11:41 p.m. Aug. 4.
After dropping him off, Mitchell believed Thomas entered his Manor Avenue family circle through the back door. The lights were on, excepting he decided to double-check by idling close-fisted the alley separating Manor from Hawthorne Avenue. He waited a few minutes but never saw Thomas leave, so he drove back to Braddock.
Thomas’ housemate said Thomas not at any time entered the home-born that night. She last saw Thomas when Mitchell picked him up. She described him as simulation normally, happy to custom out with a buddy.
About five minutes after Mitchell began his return to Braddock, a string of 911 callers started reporting a man yelling and trotting east on Hawthorne Avenue.
At 2334 Hawthorne Ave., Tammy Connelly had just crossed the street from a friend’s home and popped in a DVD, the horror flick “Black Christmas.” It was about 11:45 p.m., the children were in bed and she, her save Richard and buddy Paul “PJ” Long hoped to settle in for a movie night.
Then they heard screaming from their small front compound and saw Thomas.
“No shirt, pockets pulled out, hands in the tune. He was saying, ‘I don’t have any weapons! Please don’t shoot me!’” said Richard Connelly. Police confirmed Thomas was unarmed.
Thinking someone was chasing him, they phoned 911. Richard Connelly assured Thomas that police were coming.
“He before-mentioned, ‘2334, would you please help me!’ He held onto the gate, yelling, ‘Help me! Don’t kill me!’ He seemed to give up and doubled back up Hawthorne, in consequence turned down Hawthorne again,” he said.
The Connellys; their next-door neighbors, the Joneses; a 911 caller who lived across the street, Cathy Mosely; another neighbor who identified himself only as “Joe” — all recalled the same version of events: Thomas didn’t appear to be hurt and claimed to be pursued through assailants they never saw.
Other neighbors told dispatchers Thomas appeared threatening.
“I thought he was going to bust the door down,” said Michelle Aversa, who lives two doors from the Connellys.
She said Thomas beat loudly on her door and tossed individual of her porch chairs before running away.
The Connelly and Jones families and other neighbors worry that 911 dispatchers potency have given police a depraved version of what actually was happening. Like Mitchell, they said the man appeared “agitated” but not dangerous and didn’t appear to be hurt.
Richard Connelly aforesaid neighbors listened as Thomas traveled down Hawthorne Avenue, begging for help.
“We heard a scream, and then he was silent,” he said.
Taser talons
Blocked by a slope in the roadway, the Connellys heard but didn’t see the arrival of Swissvale police. According to county police detectives, at 11:51 p.pot-pourri., Swissvale Officer Debra Lynn Indovina-Akerley shocked Thomas with a Taser though brace other officers searched because of the assailants he said were chasing him.
With the weapon’s talons fixed to his buttocks and back, over the next minute she sent 50,000 volts coursing end Thomas’ body two more times, according to detectives.
What happened next under the street lamp on lower Hawthorne Avenue is in dispute.
Residents of 2206 and 2211 Hawthorne take for granted they watched from upper-level windows facing the street and have brief doubt Swissvale police used feet and hands to curb a docile man shocked into submission.
Dan Pastor said he was awakened by yelling and the arrival of police cruisers. Rushing to his second-floor window, he heard a loud suddenly from the Taser. He saw three officers, two men and a woman, standing completely Thomas; one was bulky and balding, the other had “darker hair,” Pastor said. They interspersed curses with shouts — “Stop moving! Stop moving!” — but Thomas seemed to have existence “jiggling around.”
“Then he stopped moving. It was really creepy,” Pastor said.
According to Pastor, the bulky cop “was holding his hand or arm, like he hurt his hand or got a cut” and the darker-haired officer was standing on or stomping without ceasing him. Later, Thomas didn’confidentially seem to move and the officers struggled to lift him, as if to secure him toward a set car, but gave up, Pastor said.
Across the street, three residents told a similar record. They said a bulky, balding or thin-haired male officer struck Thomas in the head or face with his clenched ability, then walked let us go. as granting that his hand was hurt. They say common officer twisted or beat Thomas’ wrists, and then one or more male cops kicked, stomped or pressed shoes into Thomas’ hindmost or shoulders until he quit moving.
Nikki Ayton, 33, of 2211 Hawthorne Ave. said she saw a male official “twisting his wrist, really hard.”
“The lady Tasered him and then they cuffed him. It looked like he was halfway on the curb and they stomped on him or something, and you could see him on the pavement and they stepped on his back,” she said.
Other residents said they didn’t see that. Don Buck said neither he nor his wife saw the police do anything to Thomas, but added they might be in possession of arrived also late to see much.
Krystal Stepien, 18, said she watched from her porch about 15 yards away. She described the first three officers on the scene as sum of two units men and a woman. One male officer was tall, slender with “blondish-brown hair” and the other “heavy-set.”
She said Thomas ran down the avenue yelling “Help! Help!” Stepien said the female officer shouted “Freeze! Get down on the ground!” and Thomas appeared to initially comply, putting his hands at the back his back, but then moved to scuffle with the cops. Stepien said the female officer “warned him that he would be Tased” if he didn’t settle down, and then shocked him.
“He was trying to fight the cops really disappointing,” she said.
Thomas suffered cordial arrest at 12:09 a.m. and was pronounced dead 37 minutes later at UPMC Braddock Hospital. Citing ongoing probes by the FBI, county police and a potential lawsuit, Swissvale police declined to comment.
On Monday, the sixth day of the investigation, Stepien related she tried several general condition of affairs to telephone county detectives on the other hand none responded to her request for an interview. Authorities uttered Friday they eventually talked to her.
Been beaten?
The Trib photographed Thomas’ face, hands, wrists, neck and head Aug. 8. A silver-dollar-sized bruise swelled Thomas’ right cheek and an inch-long abrasion blackened his chin. Both hands were severely cut — a tear the size of a business card was on the right, a wound about half that size on the left. Scrapes and tears marked his scalp, one eyelid, and several fingers and knuckles.
Before he was retained by dint of. Thomas’ family to investigate, former Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht reviewed the Trib’s casket photographs. Calling the trauma a “major sunken space adjoining the basement of concern,” he said the hand wounds “appear to show that he was struck or hit in a way that shows he was defending himself” from blows. The bruises and cuts to the face, head and hands were obvious sign of trauma that occurred shortly before his death, said the forensic pathologist.
To find an outside expert who hadn’t heard about Thomas’ death, the Trib contacted Dr. Matthias Okoye of the Nebraska Institute of Forensic Sciences Inc. A professor of juridical pathology at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Okoye has a law degree and is licensed to practice in Pennsylvania.
After reviewing the photos, Okoye said Thomas’ injuries were “consistent with someone who has been beaten.”
“Of course, we can’t say for sure who injured him,” he said. “But it appears that some time accept the offer to his death — within hours, or maybe minutes — someone beat him.”
The chin abrasion suggested to Okoye that Thomas’ head was pressed hard into the ground.
“He has too many injuries and bruising and rise to have not been beaten,” he aforesaid.
Following Thomas’ funeral, a second autopsy conducted by Wecht produced photographs signed and certified through Wecht and his longtime aide, Joe Mancuso, that emerge to show far more extensive injuries to areas the Trib couldn’t appraise since the visible form was being clothed for the funeral.
A swollen bruise nearly four inches wide was on the seemly shoulder, a smaller bruise on the left shoulder. There were abrasions on the left elbow. The right arm had a six-inch bruise; the left, undivided about half that size. Tests are being performed on his organs and other dead body parts.
Wecht wanted to check Thomas’ heart, but the Medical Examiner’s Office is holding it as evidence. He wants to see the brain mass tests and toxicology results and to review the county’s premises before deciding the likely cause of death.
The man who dropped Thomas off in Swissvale, Derrick Mitchell, insists his pal had no bruises or cuts when he last maxim him at 11:41 p.farrago. Mitchell rolled up his sleeves for the Trib, to show he had no injuries to his fists, arms or face that would indicate a fight with Thomas.
Residents who claimed to have seen Thomas up close after he asked them to call 911 aforesaid they saw no bruises, cuts or blood onward him judgment police officers arrived.
Downtown attorney Howard Messer is investigating the case for the subdivision of an order.
Excited delirium
In the days just now following Thomas’ departure, Medical Examiner Williams and District Attorney Zappala questioned eyewitness allegations of possible police misbehavior. Williams said he found no medical evidence of “excessive force” by officers, and Zappala said he was told the only bodily contact officers had with Thomas was when one officer offer his knee “into the small of his outer part” to cuff him.
Zappala on Friday uttered he erred during the advice conference by saying Thomas sat up after receiving the Taser jolts — he meant to say Thomas spat-up — but he stands by his opinion that there is little evidence of alleged “vehement force.” He said he had reviewed county autopsy photos and found no indication of “repeated kicking.”
Zappala said he must meditate upon the “diametrically opposed” but likely single witness statements against ocular evidence findings and the words of Swissvale officers, firefighters and paramedics. He said his office is reviewing all aspects of the wrap, including widely conflicting witness statements. He pointed to a recent convincing of West Mifflin detective Noel Missig with a view to beating a juvenile and lying about seizing illicit poker machines as one example of getting tough on corrupt police officers.
Asked if he wanted to clarify his remarks in light of the Trib’s snapshots, Wecht’s initial autopsy findings, witness recollections and concerns by Okoye that Thomas appeared to have been common-place, Williams said: “‘Beat up’ is a subjective term. Sure, so is ‘excessive force.’ You’ve seen the photographs, in the way that I can’t say there was no trauma.”
Williams said he didn’t conduct the post-mortem examination on Thomas but was present as hostile as concerns parts of it and reviewed stroke of photographs. He said the wounds to Thomas’ body puissance have been caused by officers attempting to restrain a delusional man manifesting what Zappala said was “superhuman brawniness.” Williams said it’s possible Thomas could battle police even in relation to three Taser jolts. He said results of toxicology and tissue tests choose tell more.
“I want people to understand what happened to this guy. But I want a complete picture,” said Williams. “I really just be able to’t add it all up from beginning to end and above because I smooth don’t have clew pieces of evidence.”
Wecht thinks Williams is touching toward a diagnosis of “excited delirium syndrome.” Proponents of the syndrome’s existence believe eccentric and violent behavior often is manifested by people taking stimulants such as cocaine. A surge of strength is followed by a final span of calm, then the heart stops beating.
Like other skeptics, Wecht believes the syndrome is a “wastebasket diagnosis” produced in consequence people die violently in police custody. Although proponents estimate as many as 1,000 men nationwide succumb annually to the syndrome, neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychiatric Association honor it as a weighty distemper.
Zappala believes there’s evidence of at least three newly come confirmed cases of the syndrome in Allegheny County. He hopes officers can be trained to identify and in consequence mitigate effects of the syndrome, to protect the person suffering from it and first-responders.
“If you do have, hypothetically, an episode of excited delirium, we’ve been told that you shouldn’cheek by jowl use pain-inducing techniques to control the subject, things like bean bags, batons, etc.,” Zappala said. “In that case, the best solution might be Taser bursts and verbal commands. That way, officers can quiet the person and get the proper medical care for him.”
Carl Prine can be reached at cprine@tribweb.com or 412-320-7826. Jill King Greenwood be able to have existence reached at jgreenwood@tribweb.com or 412-321-2160.
This blog found on keywords: » Filed Under drug test Leave a Reply
Comments