Why not the truth?
Judge says the NYPD & city withhold info
The NYPD said radio calls capturing a man’s final minutes as he died of a severe asthma attack in a Bronx subway station had been destroyed. Then a judge ordered an NYPD official to declare the department was telling the truth.
Suddenly, the materialized.
The newly discovered evidence in an ongoing wrongful death suit infuriated a federal judge, who lamented the “distressing situation” that left him wondering “whether there aren’t a ton more cases” in which the NYPD and city Law Department are not being forthcoming.
“It is only when someone from the legal affairs bureau or some person within the NYPD is going to have to put their name on a declaration and under penalty of perjury — and if they are lying, they can go to jail and lose their job — that we get accurate information,” Manhattan Federal Judge Kevin Castel (photo) said during a Jan. 31 court hearing to address the new evidence.
The lawsuit for unspecified radio calls damages was filed in 2015.
Karen Brown sued the city over the death of her son, Barrington (BJ) Williams, 25, who was suspected of selling illegal MetroCard swipes on Sept. 17, 2013, at the Yankee Stadium station.
Cops wrestled with him on the floor, then stood by as he struggled to breathe and died from a severe asthma attack. They did not perform CPR, although as recently as five months before the fatal encounter they had received CPR training.
His death has been compared to that of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who was also asthmatic and died in a police chokehold in 2014.
The arrest of Williams was captured on surveillance video, beginning with him being tackled by a cop, restrained and slipping into cardiac arrest. The video showed him being handcuffed at 1:57 p.m. and chest compressions being administered by an FDNY medic at 2:14 p.m. He appeared to be unconscious. Williams died as cops stood over him.
An automated external defibrillator (AED) was stored in the subway station, only a 25-second walk away, according to court documents. The device can be used by nonmedical personnel, such as police trained in CPR, in cases of sudden cardiac arrest.
The radio calls show officers requested a “rush” on an ambulance for Williams when they first contacted dispatch.
“The urgency heard in the officers’ radio calls shows they knew from the very beginning that BJ needed immediate lifesaving aid,” Brown’s attorneys Joshua Moskovitz and Jason Leventhal said in a statement to the Daily News.
The city argues the cops did not have a constitutional obligation to provide CPR.
“There was no clearly established right to have a police officer perform CPR, or use an AED, on an individual who has an asthma attack during the course of an apprehension,” city attorney Angharad Wilson wrote.
Brown cried as she recalled lying on the floor of her Bronx apartment, trying to imagine what her son endured.
“He was in their custody and he doesn’t have a right for them to save his life? And they’re trained to save lives. Just as much as they broke my heart, it angers me,” she told The News.
During the Jan. 31 hearing presided over by Castel, city attorney Qiana SmithWilliams said in September 2015 her office turned over material from an NYPD Internal Affairs probe of Williams’ death to Brown’s lawyers. The city later determined the radio calls had been destroyed through an automatic deletion protocol after 180 days.
Castel ordered that an NYPD official put his or her name on a document declaring the calls had been destroyed.
That’s when NYPD Civil Litigation Executive Director Elizabeth Daitz and Lt. Robert Corbett discovered documents from the NYPD Transit Bureau, which had conducted its own inquiry of Williams’ death. The radio calls were preserved through that probe.