Drawing direct comparisons to the death of George Floyd, a civil rights lawyer said he’s filing suit against a Florida police department in the death of a 36-year-old white man who collapsed with an officer’s knee on his neck.
Timothy Coffman died four days after four South Daytona police officers struggled to control him during an arrest in July 2018, attorney Benjamin Crump said Thursday at a news conference where he appeared with Coffman’s mother.
“It was the knee of the South Daytona Police Department that killed Timothy Coffman,” Crump said.
The death of Floyd in Minneapolis Police custody has sparked global protests against police killings. A black man, Floyd pleaded for air while offering little resistance to his arrest on May 25. Crump also represents the Floyd family.
“Like George Floyd, Timothy Coffman has a police officer’s knee on his back until he lost consciousness,” Crump said.
The South Daytona Police Department declined to comment, citing pending legal action.
Coffman was violent as officers tried to subdue him, according to body cam video. His autopsy listed the cause of death as “complications of methamphetamine toxicity” and the contributory condition as “physical restraint.”
No charges were filed against the officers.
https://apnews.com/article/9612534be8b3885bcbf9d80a36a020bb
Why was his cause of death listed as “complications of methamphetamine toxicity” and “physical restraint" only a contributory condition? Why were no charges filed against officers? Could be just because he was white? So white privilege is being "murdered by the police" and no one being charged?
Eric Farah says that had his brother and George Floyd ever met they might have been surprised to learn how much they were alike.
Despite his brother, Nicholas Farah, 36, being white and from a Wisconsin town near Lake Winnebago and Floyd, 46, being a black resident of Minneapolis, a metropolis of 429,000 people, there were some common threads that ran through both of their lives, he said. They were described by loved ones as doting fathers to their young daughters. Both were raised in strongly religious households and both were said to be guys who would "give the shirt off their back" to help their friends.
And as Eric Farah and his family have watched
protests and outbreaks of violence erupt across the nation in recent weeks in the wake of Floyd's death, they say they've been well aware of a painful commonality, one acutely connected to the frustration exhibited in the demonstrations.
Autopsies concluded that both men died a little over a year apart as the result of homicide while in police custody, each succumbing to traumatic positional asphyxiation, a problem that has haunted law enforcement agencies for years.
...both Floyd and Farah literally had their breath snatched away with their hands cuffed behind their backs while being aggressively restrained after taken into custody on suspicion of relatively minor offenses. Farah's death went largely unnoticed, but Floyd's, the latest in a string of black men killed at the hands of police and captured in excruciating detail on video, sparked national outrage and wide-ranging calls for reform.
...
In Farah's case, police responded to a "disturbance call" at a hotel in Las Vegas on March 31, 2019, and ended up arresting him and taking him to the Clark County Detention Center. Jail video showed the 5-foot-6, 156-pound Farah appear to tense up and struggle, saying "don't" and "quit" as he was being removed from a patrol car, pushed against the vehicle and searched.
Four officers, including two corrections sergeants, could be seen forcing him into a restraint chair. His head was pushed down between his legs and he was held by the back of his neck for 75 seconds as the officers pulled his hands up behind his back to replace a pair of handcuffs with another. Farah then went silently limp and medical personal standing by noticed he was in distress, according to an investigation report provided to ABC News by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD). He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
The Clark County medical examiner ruled Farah's death a homicide, resulting from "asphyxia during restraining procedures, methamphetamine intoxication and obesity."
It remains unclear if any of the officers involved in Farah's death have been disciplined. An LVMPD official told ABC News that the department "does not release administrative discipline information."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/doting-dads-george-floyd-nicholas-farah-died-hands/story?id=71054699
Again, white guy, no criminal charges filed against police, even though it was ruled a homicide due to restraint asphyxia. And they even had video of that one, with medical personnel as witnesses.
