TOLEDO, Ohio — The police officers who handcuffed and left a man facedown on the floor of a social club in Ohio last week have been put on paid administrative leave. The man who was killed while in police custody died.
Body camera video from a Canton police officer who went to the scene of a crash on Wednesday shows that he found Frank Tyson, 53, of East Canton, near the bar at an American Veterans (AMVETS) post.
A power pole was cut in half by the crash on April 18 around 8 p.m. A passing driver led police to the bar, and when they got there, a woman opened the door and said, “Please get him out of here right now.” Camera footage from Officer Beau Schoenegge shows this.
As Tyson was being taken to the ground, police grabbed him and put handcuffs on him. He fought them off and kept saying, “They’re trying to kill me” and “Call the.”
He told police right away that he couldn’t breathe while they were holding him down, including putting a knee on his back. A new study by the Associated Press found that the words “I can’t breathe” had not been taken into account in other cases of people dying while in police custody.
As Tyson lay on the tiled floor face down with his legs crossed, police told him he was okay and to stop fighting. Before they realized Tyson was having a medical emergency, police were laughing with people nearby and looking through his wallet.
Someone asked another cop five minutes after the body camera video showed Tyson saying “I can’t breathe,” if he had calmed down. Someone else said, “He might be out.”
When Tyson told police he couldn’t breathe, it sounded a lot like what happened before George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020. The office of the pathologist says Tyson was Black. The police department says that Schoenegge and Camden Burch, two white traffic bureau officers who were put on leave, are both from the Canton Police Department.
When the police told Tyson to stand up and tried to roll him over, he didn’t move. They gave him a shake and felt his heart.
After a few minutes, an officer told the medics to “step it up” because Tyson wasn’t reacting and the officer wasn’t sure if he could feel a pulse. The police started CPR.
Police in Canton wrote in their report about Tyson’s death on Friday that “shortly after securing him,” they “recognized that Tyson had become unresponsive” and started CPR. Before the doctors got there, Narcan doses were also given. In less than an hour, Tyson was declared dead at the hospital.
The Stark County Coroner’s Office’s chief detective, Harry Campbell, said Thursday that Tyson’s body was sent to a funeral home after an autopsy was done earlier in the week.
When she talked to WEWS-TV in Cleveland, his niece Jasmine Tyson said the video was “nonsense.” “Being checked out seemed to take a very long time,” Jasmine Tyson said.
Frank Tyson got out of state jail on April 6 after 24 years for kidnapping and theft. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said that he was almost immediately labeled a post-release control supervision violator for failing to report to a parole officer.
A Tyson family member who was called Thursday refused to comment right away.
The Bureau of Criminal Investigation for the Ohio Attorney General said in a statement Thursday that its investigation will not decide if force was necessary. That decision will be made by the district attorney or a grand jury.
Canton Mayor William V. Sherer II said he went to see Frank Tyson’s family to show his sympathy.
In a statement made Wednesday, Sherer said, “As we get through this tough time, my goal is to be as open with the community as possible.”
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice has told cops to roll suspects off their stomachs as soon as they are handcuffed because positional asphyxia is a risk.
A lot of police experts agree that if someone is pinned on their chest for too long or with too much weight, they can stop breathing. This is because the weight can squeeze the lungs and put stress on the heart. But putting someone on their stomach is not necessarily dangerous if it is done right.
An investigation by The Associated Press that came out in March found that over a decade, more than 1,000 people died after cops put them down using non-lethal methods, such as prone restraint.
