Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Policing reform
The crusade to ban the police use of chokeholds has a long history in Nevada ▶
Bush’s death was “justifiable,” marking the 44th consecutive justifiable verdict handed down in coroner’s inquests since 1976.
Two days later, then-District Attorney Rex Bell announced that he would not charge the officers. “I would destroy the whole integrity of this process if I overturned it,” Bell said of the coroner’s inquest.
The integrity of the process, which no longer is used today, was questioned anyway by top county officials. It was replaced in 2013, following years of discussions, with a new process called the fact-finding review, which is held only after the Clark County district attorney’s office already has made a “preliminary determination” that no charges will be filed against an officer.
Unlike at coroner’s inquests, officers no longer testify during the new review process. And since its inception, not a single preliminary determination has been overturned following a fact-finding review.
“It is not a perfect process because the involved officers that caused the death of one of our citizens cannot be forced to testify,” Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson told the Review-Journal this month, adding that the process “is probably ripe for review to determine if any more improvements could be made.”
After Bell’s decision in 1990, the Nevada attorney general’s office stepped in, and the officers were indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter and oppression under the color of office. A Clark County jury deadlocked 11-1 to acquit the men a few months later, and a mistrial was declared.
Then-District Judge J. Charles Thompson personally disagreed with the jury and said the officers had illegally entered Bush’s apartment. Thompson also said that had Bush survived and been arrested, he would have thrown out the case in court.
Amerson was fired in March 1991 by then-Clark County Sheriff John Moran, who since has died, and both Chasey and Campbell were demoted. Chasey left the department five years later, and Campbell retired in 2007. Amerson died in 2004 at the age of 74, and Chasey died in December at the age of 78. Efforts to reach Campbell for this story were unsuccessful, though public records indicate he lives in Arizona.
Twenty-seven years would pass before another Metro officer faced charges in connection with an in-custody killing.
Revised use-of-force policies
Black people make up just 12 percent of the population in the Las Vegas Valley, but on average in the last five years, according to Metro statistics, 32 percent of the people shot by police were Black.
Nationally, Metro has been praised as a model for police reform and transparency since 2012, when the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the department’s use of force in light of a Review-Journal series that uncovered examples of poor training within the department, a lack of clear policies and an unwillingness to discipline problem officers.
But for Metro, the years that followed the DOJ cleanup also have been marked by several high-profile
CHARLES BUSH
killings of unarmed Black men, including the deaths of Tashii Brown in 2017 and Byron Williams in 2019.
A white officer shocked Brown seven times with a stun gun and punched him at least a dozen times before placing him in an unauthorized, martial-arts-type chokehold for more than a minute.
Williams, who was stopped for riding his bicycle without safety lights, told police, “I can’t breathe,” at least 17 times while officers pinned him on the ground using their hands and knees. A fact-finding review is set for Aug. 26.
Significant changes to Metro’s useof-force policy, specifically regarding restraints that cut off the flow of oxygen and blood, came after both deaths. This month, following weeks of local Black Lives Matter protests, Metro again changed its policy on a certain neck restraint technique — this time only allowing its use in “life-threatening situations.”
The department previously permitted the neck restraint, known as the lateral vascular neck restraint, in any instance when an officer was confronted by “an assaultive person.”
“I don’t think reclassifying it is enough,” said Wesley Juhl, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and a former crime reporter for the Review-Journal. “I think every cop knows what to say to avoid any accountability, and it’s just as easy enough for them to say, ‘I felt like my life was in danger.’ ”
The ACLU has long been at the forefront of local conversations surrounding police brutality and played a significant role in the aftermath of Bush’s death, calling for transparency and charges against the officers.
Metro did not respond to a request for an interview with Sheriff Joe Lombardo for this story, but at the time of the policy change the department issued this statement: “We are constantly evolving and looking for ways to improve our Use of Force standards. In this case, a national conversation about this technique showed us that we had room for improvement.”
‘Zero accountability’
In Las Vegas, there was outrage after Bush’s death 30 years ago. There was outrage after Brown’s death three years ago. And there was outrage after Williams’ death last year.
Each of the killings prompted protests. None has resulted in convictions.
“My first reaction in reviewing Charles Bush’s killing was how eerily familiar it is,” Juhl said. “If you change some of the names, this could have happened yesterday. It’s the same thing: zero accountability, a district attorney that’s reluctant to act, questions about racial bias involving policing. It’s really sad that we haven’t made more progress.”
In 2015, 51 percent of Americans said they believed racial discrimination to be a “big problem,” according to a poll conducted by the Monmouth University Polling institute, a leading center for the study of public opinion on national and state issues. Now, five years later, that figure has jumped to 76 percent, a recent Monmouth poll found.
“George Floyd’s death was so blatantly wrong, I think it got everyone’s attention,” said Charles Hayes, an ex-Dallas police officer who went on to study bias in policing and write a book about it. “Now there are conversations happening that might not have ever taken place before.”
Kenneth Lopera, the officer who killed Brown, was initially charged in 2017 with involuntary manslaughter and oppression under the color of office. He was the first officer, since Bush’s killing, to be charged in an in-custody death. But Wolfson stopped pursuing charges against Lopera after a grand jury declined to indict him.
Thirty years ago, before Wolfson became the top prosecutor in Clark County, he was a criminal defense attorney who represented Amerson, the officer who choked Bush.
Asked whether his role in the Bush case could cast doubt in the community about his willingness to prosecute police officers, he told the Review-Journal: “It is nonsense to suggest that my office is not willing to prosecute law enforcement when we are currently prosecuting so many of them.”
He said his office, as of this month, was prosecuting 15 police officers for charges ranging from sexual assault and domestic battery to DUI and embezzlement.
Leaving Las Vegas
A few months after Bush’s death, Siddoway was convicted of soliciting for prostitution, but she has long maintained her innocence.
She left Las Vegas that same year, in late 1990, to give birth and raise Charles Jr. near her family in a city in western Oregon.
“It was traumatizing — all of it,” Siddoway said. “It’s truly a miracle that he was born, seriously, because I hardly ate.”
For a long time, she missed Bush. They’d been together for about three years when he died. And maybe, she admitted this month, their relationship wouldn’t have lasted all these years, but their relationship’s end wasn’t Metro’s decision to make, she said.
She still thinks of him from time to time. But how could she not, when her son is the spitting image of his father? Same eyes, same smile, same athletic gifts. Bush, who was 6-foot6, was once a college basketball star. Charles Jr., an inch taller, was once a college football star.
Siddoway never married. In a way,
she said, her youth was stolen from her the night Bush died. She was 31 at the time.
“My perspective on trust after Charles’ death is very different. That part of my life is long gone,” she said of dating. She paused, glanced at her son seated across from her, and added, “But I have a partner right there.”
Charles Jr. smiled.
Speaking up
In all, Metro paid out $1.1 million in settlements in Bush’s death. When Charles Jr. was 1, Metro settled a civil rights lawsuit filed on his behalf for $625,000. At the time, it was thought to be the largest Metro civil rights settlement.
Several months later, Metro settled a wrongful death lawsuit for $475,000 filed on behalf of Bush’s mother, Eula Mae Vincent, and his daughter, Angela Nicole Robertson, who was 17 at the time of his death. Vincent died in 2013, and Robertson could not be reached for this story.
The money for Charles Jr. helped pay for his private school tuition and sports throughout his childhood. It helped Siddoway build a better life for her son.
Still, Siddoway said, the money could never replace what was taken from him: a father and a Black man to look up to.
Charles Jr. was raised by a single white mom in Oregon, where the population is 87 percent white. He didn’t have Black friends growing up, he said, because usually, he was “the Black friend” in the group.
He’s lived his life toeing the line between Black and white, constantly feeling like he never really fit in anywhere.
“That’s something he’s never admitted to me before,” Siddoway later told the Review-Journal.
Siddoway now works in the medical field and wants to advance her career. Maybe nursing school, she contemplates. In her free time, she shops at thrift stores and tends to her flowers outside her cozy one-story home, where she lives with Charles Jr., her aging father and a pit bull terrier named Prince.
Charles Jr., who uses his mom’s last name, was recently laid off from his job at a bar due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He didn’t finish college but promises his mom that he will go back to school.
They live a quiet, boring life, far removed from the city where their family member was killed by police — exactly how Siddoway envisioned their future 30 years ago. But the scars remain, so neither stays silent.
“It’s important to get out there and have our voices heard,” Charles Jr. said.
So on a recent Friday evening, a few weeks ahead of Bush’s death anniversary, Siddoway strolled down a sidewalk, the Oregon sun’s golden light washing over her porcelain skin.
Moving slower than the rest of the crowd, because of a bad knee that will soon need to be replaced, Siddoway joined in on the chants: “Black lives matter! Black lives matter!”
Even in this city, where Black people account for less than 2 percent of the population, protesters continue to show up in the hundreds more than a month after Floyd’s killing.