Following prosecutors’ decision not to present the case that ended in Terence Caffey’s death to a grand jury, his legal team shared body-camera and surveillance footage of the moments leading up to the Black man’s death more than nine months ago. Caffey was accused of fighting with workers at the Movie Tavern theater in Little Rock, Arkansas when Sgt. Mark Swagerty, an off-duty sheriff's deputy with the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office, intervened and forced Caffey against a wall on Dec. 10, 2021, ABC-affiliated KATV reported of the deputy named in a prosecutor’s letter to the sheriff. The deputy later threw Caffey on the floor, keeping him pinned, the footage showed.
Other officers arrived about five minutes later and helped drag Caffey out of the theater.
”I can’t breathe,” he said at one point in the footage.
“You talking, you breathing,” one of the law enforcement officers on the scene responded.
RELATED STORY: It's not cops beating Black people to death. It's the sickle cell trait, medical examiners allege
Caffey’s family attorney Ben Crump has maintained that officials have been slow to release the truth of what happened during the encounter. Surveillance footage earlier released didn't show a deputy wrapping his hand around Caffey's neck or putting his knee on Caffey’s back, attorneys said.
Crump said during a news conference on Wednesday that he and a medical examiner he consulted believes by the time backup officers arrived and placed Caffey in a patrol car, he was already dead.
“The 30-yo cried out that he couldn't breathe, yet officers continued detaining him with FORCE & dragged his LIFELESS body into a police car,” Crump tweeted. “Deputies did not provide medical aid for Terence until he was unconscious. Unfortunately, it was too late.”
Warning: This video contains body-camera and surveillance footage of brutality that may be triggering to viewers.
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Terence died at Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock.
"They put him in the car and it’s like no problem (...),” Crump said. “They all just kickin it, talking like no problem at all. Finally, one of the officers goes to check in the back of the police car with their light and they say ‘oh, we got a problem.’ Maybe he wasn't just saying he can't breathe."
Elizabeth White, another attorney on the legal team for Caffey's family, said Pulaski County prosecutors declined to charge law enforcement officers involved. "They made the decision not to even present the case to the grand jury," White said.
Prosecutor Larry Jegley told KATV the state constitution allows prosecutors to decide whether to send a case to a grand jury and whether to charge a person criminally. "The law’s the law. The evidence is the evidence, and the investigation is the investigation and our ruling is our ruling," Jegley said.
He told Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins in a letter KATV obtained that Caffey had the trait for sickle cell, was having a sickling crisis related to having the trait, and that condition caused his death. “Multiple consultations were had with different medical experts to help us with our conclusions,” Jegley alleged.
He presented what police seem to consider a tried and true defense for allegations of deadly police brutality, and unfortunately medical examiners don’t seem to have a problem backing cops up. The New York Times found in an analysis of 25 years of law enforcement and medical records that officers, their attorneys and medical examiners have been using the sickle cell trait found in one in 13 Black people to wiggle out of accountability in at least 46 cases in which Black people died in custody.
George Floyd, the Black father fatally pinned under the knee of a former Minneapolis police officer, also carried the sickle cell trait and it was brought up in a failed motion to dismiss the case against Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin.
The fact that Mr. Floyd had sickle cell trait is significant, as well,” Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson wrote in the motion. “(...) People suffering from sickle cell ‘can develop high blood pressure in their lungs. This complication usually affects adults. Shortness of breath and fatigue are common symptoms of this condition, which can be fatal.’
“Put simply, Mr. Floyd could not breathe because he had ingested a lethal dose of fentanyl and, possibly, a speedball,” Nelson wrote. “Combined with sickle cell trait, his pre-existing heart conditions, Mr.Floyd’s use of fentanyl and methamphetamine most likely killed him.”
Luckily, a jury didn’t buy that ridiculous assertion, but Arkansas prosecutors didn’t even give a jury an opportunity to review the actual evidence of the case—the kind of miscarriage of justice that is all too common in America.
In an opinion Jegley cited and attempted to refute, the American Society of Hematology wrote on May 21, 2021: "It is medically inaccurate to claim sickle cell crisis as the cause of death based solely on the presence of sickled cells autopsy. Sudden death is an extraordinarily rare occurrence in sickle cell trait and the finding of sickle cell trait is unlikely to supersede other inflicted traumas as the cause or major factor in death."
Jegley went on to claim that the medical examiner he used didn't base his diagnosis "on merely the presence of sickled cells at autopsy," but on "the entirety of the medical death investigation including circumstances, scene investigation, autopsy findings, and ancillary studies that informed the medical examiner's opinion of the cause and manner of death."
Jegley went on to write that "given the rarity" of Caffey's cause of death, "it cannot be said that the failure to diagnose and appropriately treat Mr. Caffey was a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in law enforcement's situation."
Now, that part I believe. Caffey’s treatment by law enforcement was not a “gross deviation from the standard of care” Black people should expect from law enforcement, and that should make anyone reading these words utterly sick.