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Five Memphis cops beat an unarmed black man to death and they are still walking free/ I am so glad not to live in the American South.
n III, center, a former Memphis Police Department officer, faces both federal and state charges in the death of Tyre Nichols.Credit...Patrick Lantrip/Daily Memphian, via Associated Press Emily Cochrane By Emily Cochrane Reporting from Nashville.
Aug. 22, 2024
A second former Memphis police officer is set to change his not-guilty plea to federal charges connected to the beating and death of Tyre Nichols last year, according to court documents filed Thursday.
The officer, Emmitt Martin III, is among the former officers who were indicted on federal civil rights, conspiracy and obstruction charges last September. He is scheduled to appear in federal court on Friday for a change-of-plea hearing.
Whether he has reached a plea agreement with prosecutors, and if so, what it involves, was not immediately clear. Another former officer in the case, Desmond Mills Jr., pleaded guilty in November to two felony charges of obstruction of justice and excessive force, as part of a deal struck with federal prosecutors.
The remaining three officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith — have pleaded not guilty to both federal and state charges related to the death of Mr. Nichols. A federal trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 9 in Memphis.
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It remains unclear why Memphis police officers stopped Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, as he was driving home from work on Jan. 7, 2023. Video footage captured by surveillance cameras and the officers’ body cameras showed that the encounter became violent, as the officers kicked and pummeled Mr. Nichols, despite his lack of resistance and his pained pleas for them to stop.
Editors’ Picks The Sun Will Destroy the Earth One Day, Right? Maybe Not.Sept. 26, 2024 ‘Saturday Night Live’: 11 Defining Political SketchesOct. 3, 2024 Go Ahead, Gild That LilySept. 28, 2024 Mr. Nichols died in a hospital three days later, and an autopsy report ruled his death to have been a homicide caused by blows to the head.
The brutality captured in the video images horrified the nation and the city of Memphis, where officials quickly fired the five officers, who are also Black. The police department disbanded its elite Scorpion unit, to which all of the officers belonged. The city issued a number of administrative punishments and firings in both the police and fire departments, citing the violence against Mr. Nichols and a failure to provide him with medical care despite the extent of his injuries.
Mr. Martin was among the officers charged in both state and federal court, and he pleaded not guilty.
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A federal grand jury indicted the former officers on two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, as well as two additional counts related to witness tampering and obstruction and misleading officials about what happened.
Separately, state prosecutors levied seven felony charges against the five men, including second-degree murder, kidnapping, aggravated assault and official misconduct.
As part of Mr. Mills’s federal plea deal in November, he agreed to cooperate fully with the state case. This was expected to include pleading guilty to at least some of the state charges, and potentially testifying against the other officers.
The five officers are also named in a lawsuit filed by Mr. Nichols’s family against the city of Memphis and the Police Department.
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A New York Times analysis of video footage shows that Mr. Martin was among the first officers to approach Mr. Nichols and forcefully restrain him. When Mr. Nichols broke away and ran toward his mother’s house, Mr. Martin chased him, then repeatedly kicked and punched him in the head.
A lawyer for Mr. Martin, William Massey, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Skip to contentSkip to site indexSearch & Section Navigation Account Trial Over Tyre Nichols’s Death
Memphis olice beat, kicked and tortured qn unarmed man to death and the people of Memphis let the police go.
3 Former Officers Acquitted What to Know The Prosecution’s Case Timeline Video Investigation Who Was Tyre Nichols? Video of Tyre Nichols Beating Raises Questions About Medical Response Two emergency medical technicians who first evaluated Mr. Nichols have been suspended until an investigation is complete.
Share full article 796 Blue, pink and red balloons lie on a quiet street corner at night. A memorial for Tyre Nichols at the corner where he was fatally beaten by Memphis police officers.Credit...Desiree Rios/The New York Times By Nicholas Bogel-BurroughsGina Kolata and Mark Walker Jan. 29, 2023 MEMPHIS — Tyre Nichols writhed in pain on the pavement after being beaten by Memphis police officers. His back was against a police car, his hands were cuffed and his face was bloody. He was groaning, and he kept falling over.
A few feet away, two emergency medical workers looked on. They helped Mr. Nichols sit up a few times after he had slumped to his side, but then, for nearly seven minutes, they did not touch him. At one point, they walked away.
Mr. Nichols, a father and FedEx worker who liked photography and skateboarding, died in a hospital three days later. Five officers were fired and have been charged with second-degree murder in his death.
Videos of the Jan. 7 beating released on Friday have led people to scrutinize those officers’ actions frame by frame. But the footage has also turned the public’s attention to the emergency medical workers who first arrived on the scene after the beating, raising the question of whether they should or could have done more to help Mr. Nichols.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “It seems like they did not have the decent humanity to render aid to a man who was, at first, calling for his mother, but then laying against the car,” said JB Smiley Jr., the vice chairman of the Memphis City Council.
Both of the medical workers who arrived first to tend to Mr. Nichols appeared to be emergency medical technicians with the Memphis Fire Department. Fire E.M.T.s often respond more quickly than ambulance crews to emergency calls, but their job is largely to carry out fundamental first aid: conducting a basic neurological assessment, making sure patients can breathe, checking their vital signs and stemming any major bleeding.
Qwanesha Ward, a spokeswoman for the Fire Department, said on Friday that the department had suspended two of its E.M.T.s who had treated Mr. Nichols and that an investigation was expected to wrap up early this week. She declined to identify the medics.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT To many in Memphis, the videos were troubling, appearing to show the medical workers responding without urgency to Mr. Nichols’s suffering.
Image In an image from a video, a man is lying on his side next to a car, while others are standing around him. An investigation into the response by E.M.T.s is expected to be completed early this week. Credit...City of Memphis, via Associated Press Experts in emergency medicine noted that the first medics on a scene were often the least trained and frequently relied in part on the police — who, in this case, said Mr. Nichols was on drugs — to understand a patient’s condition.
Dr. Sean Montgomery, a trauma expert at Duke University’s medical school, said that it was difficult to evaluate the medical response, given the low quality of the nearby surveillance camera, but that the responding medical personnel did not seem to have followed standard protocol, which calls for stopping any major bleeding and then assessing a patient’s airway and breathing.
Editors’ Picks ‘Saturday Night Live’: 11 Defining Political SketchesOct. 3, 2024 Tolerating the Office When It Feels Like High SchoolSept. 29, 2024 Who Invited Jack Nicholson to the Fashion Show?Oct. 1, 2024 He said it was not clear that anyone had begun to fully assess Mr. Nichols, in line with those standards, until about 15 minutes after the medics had arrived. That is when medics can be seen going into their bag of tools and treatments. At that point, it had been 21 minutes since an officer last kicked Mr. Nichols.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “The patient clearly seems to be in shock and have trouble breathing, even with the poor camera view,” Dr. Montgomery wrote in an email, adding that emergency response crews are often undertrained and underfunded.
Dr. Alan Tyroch, the chief of surgery and trauma at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, said he had watched a video of the response several times but had found the quality so poor that it was nearly impossible to evaluate what medical care was being provided, or by whom.
“Nobody really knows except the people who were there,” he said.
An ambulance pulled up to the scene more than 25 minutes after the police officers had stopped beating Mr. Nichols. Medical response times have been a problem in many cities, including Memphis, where officials have said they are experiencing a rise in 911 calls, straining the system.
In recent years, the Memphis firefighters’ union has tried to calm fears about slow response times by noting that Fire Department E.M.T.s often show up before more skilled paramedics and ambulance units do. Union officials did not respond to inquiries, and the Fire Department did not respond to questions about the specifics of its response.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Nichols suffered his fatal injuries after police officers kicked, punched and used a baton to beat him. They said later that they had pulled him over because he was driving recklessly. The police had pulled him out of his car and ordered him onto the ground, continuing to yell at him and threaten him even as he lay on his side, pleading with them to stop. When one officer pepper-sprayed him, he got up and ran in the direction of his mother’s house, but officers caught him about 200 feet from her home and began to pummel him.
Afterward, some officers dragged a handcuffed Mr. Nichols to a police car and propped him up against it. In the first five minutes that the medics were on the scene, Mr. Nichols fell to his side six times. The medics helped him up several times and at one point asked a police officer to shine a light on him.
Image Signs lie next to a tree, along with candles and flowers at night. One sign reads: “Justice for Tyre.” A vigil for Mr. Nichols in Memphis on Thursday. Credit...Brad J. Vest for The New York Times At that point, several Memphis officers can be heard insisting that Mr. Nichols, 29, must be high, and they sound surprised to have learned that nothing was found in his pockets or in the car.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Some laughed as they recalled their assault in detail. “Man, I was hitting him with straight haymakers, dog,” one said. It is not clear from the body camera videos whether the medics heard those conversations.
Among the seven felony charges filed against each of the officers is an accusation that they refrained from performing a duty that was either imposed by law or was inherent as part of their jobs. This could cover a range of behavior, but the Shelby County district attorney, Steven J. Mulroy, suggested at a news conference last week that the charge had to do in part with their communications with medical officials.
On-duty police officers, Mr. Mulroy said, have a duty “to prevent official misconduct and to accurately report information to medical personnel who show up.”
The officers have not entered a plea. Lawyers for the officers have cautioned people to wait for more details before judging them. Blake Ballin, who represents Desmond Mills Jr., one of the five officers, said in a statement that the videos have “produced as many questions as they have answers.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT At the scene, the medics at times appeared to defer to the police, standing back at one point as a police officer asked Mr. Nichols what drugs he had taken. Mr. Nichols largely groaned in response, though twice he appears to answer “alcohol.”
For about the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds, no one touches Mr. Nichols as he rolls back and forth on the pavement.
Video Video Shows Memphis Police Officers Beating Tyre Nichols
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On Jan. 7 Memphis police pulled over Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man. During the traffic stop, the officers beat Mr. Nichols. Three days later he died.CreditCredit...via City of Memphis The official cause of Mr. Nichols’s death has not been released by the Shelby County medical examiner’s office. The family said it had commissioned a separate, private autopsy that determined he had suffered from extensive bleeding.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT When a young person like Mr. Nichols dies three days after a beating involving blows to the head, Dr. Montgomery said, brain injuries are the most likely cause. He said that, based on video of the beating, Mr. Nichols had likely been at risk for severe traumatic brain injury, rib fractures, collapsed lungs and internal bleeding.
Dr. Montgomery said it was not easy to say whether getting Mr. Nichols into an ambulance or to the hospital more quickly would have made a difference, though some cases, such as a brain injury, would have been helped by early surgery.
“Some brain injuries are too severe for medical care to improve them,” he added. “However, if you manage the other injuries well, the brain will do better. For example, if the patient is not breathing well, the brain will have a much worse outcome.”
The police in Memphis have said that Mr. Nichols was taken to the hospital after complaining about shortness of breath.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT At a march on Saturday in response to the police killing, some Memphis residents said they were nearly as disturbed by the medical response as they were by the officers’ actions. Towanna Murphy, who operates a radio station in Memphis, said the medics needed to be held accountable.
“When you see somebody laying there,” Ms. Murphy said, “you’re supposed to give medical treatment right away.”
Rick Rojas contributed reporting from Memphis.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national news. He is from upstate New York and previously reported in Baltimore, Albany, and Isla Vista, Calif. More about Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Gina Kolata writes about science and medicine. She has twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and is the author of six books, including “Mercies in Disguise: A Story of Hope, a Family's Genetic Destiny, and The Science That Saved Them.” More about Gina Kolata
Mark Walker is an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Covid-19 in 2020. He grew up in Savannah, Ga., and graduated from Fort Valley State University. More about Mark Walker
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 30, 2023, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Medical Response After Nichols Beating Is Under Scrutiny. See more on: Tyre Nichols
Two emergency medical technicians who first evaluated Mr. Nichols have been suspended until an investigation is complete.
Share full article 796 Blue, pink and red balloons lie on a quiet street corner at night. A memorial for Tyre Nichols at the corner where he was fatally beaten by Memphis police officers.Credit...Desiree Rios/The New York Times By Nicholas Bogel-BurroughsGina Kolata and Mark Walker Jan. 29, 2023
MEMPHIS — Tyre Nichols writhed in pain on the pavement after being beaten by Memphis police officers. His back was against a police car, his hands were cuffed and his face was bloody. He was groaning, and he kept falling over.
A few feet away, two emergency medical workers looked on. They helped Mr. Nichols sit up a few times after he had slumped to his side, but then, for nearly seven minutes, they did not touch him. At one point, they walked away.
Mr. Nichols, a father and FedEx worker who liked photography and skateboarding, died in a hospital three days later. Five officers were fired and have been charged with second-degree murder in his death.
Videos of the Jan. 7 beating released on Friday have led people to scrutinize those officers’ actions frame by frame. But the footage has also turned the public’s attention to the emergency medical workers who first arrived on the scene after the beating, raising the question of whether they should or could have done more to help Mr. Nichols.
“It seems like they did not have the decent humanity to render aid to a man who was, at first, calling for his mother, but then laying against the car,” said JB Smiley Jr., the vice chairman of the Memphis City Council.
Both of the medical workers who arrived first to tend to Mr. Nichols appeared to be emergency medical technicians with the Memphis Fire Department. Fire E.M.T.s often respond more quickly than ambulance crews to emergency calls, but their job is largely to carry out fundamental first aid: conducting a basic neurological assessment, making sure patients can breathe, checking their vital signs and stemming any major bleeding.
Qwanesha Ward, a spokeswoman for the Fire Department, said on Friday that the department had suspended two of its E.M.T.s who had treated Mr. Nichols and that an investigation was expected to wrap up early this week. She declined to identify the medics.
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To many in Memphis, the videos were troubling, appearing to show the medical workers responding without urgency to Mr. Nichols’s suffering.
Image In an image from a video, a man is lying on his side next to a car, while others are standing around him.
As three police officers face a federal trial, the city is embroiled in a standoff with state Republican leaders over its policing and public safety policies.
Listen to this article · 8:03 min Learn more Share full article People march down a street holding signs with Tyre Nichols’s name on them. Protesters marched in front of police headquarters over the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis in January 2023.Credit...Gerald Herbert/Associated Press Emily Cochrane By Emily Cochrane Sept. 9, 2024
The agonizing footage of Memphis police officers kicking and punching Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old man, during a Jan. 7, 2023, traffic stop horrified the city and the nation.
Fallout was swift: Five officers were fired and charged in connection with Mr. Nichols’s beating and death. The Police Department disbanded the street crime unit the officers belonged to. And the City Council approved a series of new policing ordinances, including one to reduce traffic stops for minor infractions.
But as three of the former officers are set to stand trial for civil rights and obstruction charges in federal court on Monday, there is a sense for some in Memphis that progress has stalled. The city is again embroiled in a standoff with state Republican leaders over its policing and public safety policies, a brewing dispute that lawmakers have threatened to escalate by stripping the city of a share of state sales tax revenues.
And the violence at the center of the charges is also likely to reignite a debate over police tactics and the often brutal treatment of Black men by law enforcement, at a moment when cities and states have left many of their police accountability goals unresolved.
“We’ve been able to grieve a little and heal a little — however, now that this trial is coming up, we’re going to have to relive all of that again,” said RowVaughn Wells, Mr. Nichols’s mother, in an interview. She still has not watched the videos showing what happened to her son.
Mr. Nichols’s stepfather, Rodney Wells, added, “We’ll never fully heal, but justice for Tyre is a step in the right direction.”
Nationwide, cases brought against police officers have resulted in a mixed array of convictions, acquittals and at least one mistrial. Of the five former officers originally charged in connection with Mr. Nichols’s death, two have since pleaded guilty to federal charges of depriving Mr. Nichols of his civil rights and lying about what had happened.
Image A group of people gather for a candlelit vigil. A vigil for Mr. Nichols in January 2023, attended by his stepfather, Rodney Wells, bottom right, and his mother, RowVaughn Wells, second from bottom right.Credit...Brad J. Vest for The New York Times Many of the facts of the case are still shrouded: The pretrial legal arguments — including over what witness testimony and evidence can be heard — have largely been sealed from public view, in part, Judge Mark Norris has said, to ensure an impartial jury
Representatives for the Police Department and the office of the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Tennessee declined to comment. Lawyers for the three former officers set to stand trial, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith, did not respond to a request for comment. Trials on state charges, including second-degree murder, are still pending, as is a multimillion lawsuit against the city.
“The fact that you do have both state and federal charges being brought — you wouldn’t have seen this five years ago,” said Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer who has represented both Mr. Nichols’s family and a number of families affected by police violence. “So there’s incremental progress, but we can’t get complacent.”
Mr. Nichols’s family and Memphis residents are bracing for a painful recitation of the brutal beating he endured and still-unknown details about why he was stopped that night.
“It is not impossible for us to have police officers who are focused on protection and on safety, and not have the death of people at the hands of police,” said State Representative Justin J. Pearson, who represents Memphis and Shelby County in the Tennessee legislature.
What matters to you in the South?After four years writing about Congress, Emily Cochrane is now covering the South for The Times. She is eager to learn about what makes life in this changing region distinct, and to talk to people whose lives have been directly affected by laws passed in Washington. Share your thoughts | More about Emily Cochrane In the 20 months since Mr. Nichols’s death, the state’s Republican leaders have repeatedly maligned Steve Mulroy, the newly elected district attorney for Shelby County, and other Memphis-area officials for failing to address the scope of the city’s crime issues and overstepping their legal boundaries.
At least one police reform ordinance supported by Mr. Nichols’s family, which would have prevented police from stopping cars over more minor traffic infractions, was repealed by Republicans in the legislature.
Mr. Mulroy now faces a threat to oust him from his position when the legislature convenes in January, led by State Senator Brent Taylor. And last month, the top two Republicans in the legislature threatened to withhold sales tax revenue from the city, the second-largest in the state, over plans to put three gun safety initiatives on the November ballot.
Edited by SkyWave (10/05/24 12:20 AM)
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