Milwaukee police are looking into the death of a Black man in an incident that is drawing comparisons to the 2020 killing of George Floyd, after footage emerged that appears to show hotel guards pinning the man to the ground as he called for help.
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Black man dies, crying for help, after hotel guards pin him down, video shows
Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer representing Mitchell’s family, said in a statement that a witness to the June 30 incident had reported seeing one of the guards “striking him in the head with an object.” Police did not address those allegations.
“It is deeply troubling that we have lost another Black man in an encounter with security personnel, raising serious concerns about the use of force, lack of accountability, and absence of mental health considerations,” Crump added in the statement. “The circumstances surrounding Dvontaye’s death outside the Hyatt Regency Hotel are disturbing and as described by a witness, reminiscent of the killing of George Floyd.”
Floyd, who was Black, died in Minneapolis in 2020 after a White police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes — an incident that sparked a wave of global protests over racial inequality. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted and sent to federal prison.
Police said they were called to the Hyatt for a person causing a disturbance about 3:20 p.m. on June 30. They received a report that the person began fighting while being escorted out. When they arrived, officers found the person unresponsive and unsuccessfully tried “lifesaving measures.”
Crump’s statement identified the person as Mitchell and said his mother “believes he was suffering from a mental health episode.”
“Shocking cell phone video corroborates accounts of several witnesses,” the statement added. “Dvontaye’s family is now left searching for answers and justice in the face of this tragic loss.”
It is not clear what happened immediately before or after the videos were recorded. In one video broadcast by local media, a guard appears to address the person shooting the video, shouting: “This is what happens when you go into the ladies’ room.” The company that runs the hotel, Aimbridge Hospitality, did not immediately respond to a question about whether Mitchell had entered a women’s restroom.
Mitchell’s family and legal team should be given access to the full footage of what happened that day, his mother, Brenda Giles, said during a news conference near the hotel Monday, adding: “I want justice for my son.”
“From the time he got here, to the time he went in there, to the time he ran into this bathroom … we should be able to see all of that. Why haven’t they showed us?” asked Mitchell’s sister, Nayisha Mitchell.
Milwaukee police said they are looking into the incident and the cause of Mitchell’s death.
“The matter has been referred to our office and is currently pending further investigation. There’s no timeline for a charging decision at this time,” the Milwaukee district attorney’s office told The Post on Tuesday.
The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office said July 1 that the preliminary cause of Mitchell’s death was homicide, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
The medical examiner’s office said in 2018 that it defines homicide as “death ‘at the hands of another’ regardless of intent,” purely based on “the medical evidence present at the time of the investigation,” and its determination does not necessarily mean that someone else is legally responsible for the death.
The office did not respond to a request for comment early Tuesday.
Giles told Milwaukee NBC affiliate WTMJ that Mitchell was “a loving son, brother, uncle, daddy.” But she said Mitchell changed after losing his father in 2016.
Nayisha Mitchell said her brother went into a depression after that and “was trying to also work on himself.”
She told WISN 12 News that the security team “should have been trained to deal with this type of situation. Mental illness is real.”
A spokesperson for Hyatt said: “We extend our heartfelt condolences to Dvontaye Mitchell’s family, all those who knew and loved him, and the Milwaukee community in light of this tragedy.”
The spokesperson said the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee is “operated by Aimbridge Hospitality, which is responsible for the management of hotel employees, including the disciplinary actions related to the individuals involved in this incident. We understand Aimbridge Hospitality is still completing its investigation, and to date, has suspended its employees involved in the incident.”
A spokesperson for Aimbridge Hospitality said: “We offer our sincere condolences to Mr. Mitchell’s family and loved ones. We continue to do everything we can to support law enforcement’s ongoing investigation into this incident and have no further comment at this time. We remain committed to maintaining a safe and welcoming environment for all hotel guests and associates.”
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
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Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
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Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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