A push to reexamine the police-involved death of Tyrone West in 2013 has officials at odds over who should do the work, underscoring the challenges families seeking justice can face even when they have convinced a prosecutor that questions remain unanswered.
Maryland
Maryland prosecutors privately clash over 2013 police-involved death
Despite the recent missives, there has been no resolution on how or whether an investigation will proceed.
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan J. Bates (D), who has jurisdiction, says the case merits review but a conflict will prevent his office from handling it. Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D), who will soon have authority to prosecute new police-involved fatalities, is not embracing Bates’s request to initiate an investigation and instead is questioning why the local prosecutor is not taking steps to work around the potential conflict.
Jones said she is grateful that Brown and Bates are having a discussion about the case, a development that she has never witnessed before. But, she added, “while people are debating my brother is still laying in the ground without any accountability.”
Awaiting examination are independent autopsies Jones provided that contradict the state’s original findings, and inconsistencies in statements following the incident that Bates, in a July 6 letter to Brown, said helped convince him that an investigation should be pursued.
The autopsies ordered by West’s family determined that he died of positional asphyxia, Bates’s letter states, not a heart condition as an original review concluded. The initial autopsy was conducted under the leadership of then-Maryland medical examiner David Fowler, whose office’s work on people who died in law enforcement custody is undergoing an unprecedented third-party review. It is not clear whether West’s case is among those selected for additional scrutiny as part of the probe.
Police at the time said that when West was told to get out of the car, they saw a bulge in his sock that they suspected was drugs, and a chase and altercation ensued. Jones said police created a false narrative to paint her brother as someone officers feared. In his letter to Brown, Bates cited depositions provided by Jones that indicated that there were no drugs found at the scene or on materials tested.
After failing to gain traction, Bates late last month sent another letter to the state prosecutor’s office, which investigates misconduct of public officials, requesting that it review the case. In the July 28 letter, Bates tells State Prosecutor Charlton T. Howard III that the attorney general said “he is not inclined to investigate this matter.”
Spokesmen for the state prosecutor’s office and the attorney general’s office declined to comment on Bates’s letters or say whether either would investigate West’s case.
“My biggest thing is I’ll just be glad when the dots are connected. And if they get it to the state prosecutor or whoever, this needs to be investigated — like 10 years ago,” Jones said.
While Brown’s office received fresh powers to intervene in officer-involved deaths amid sweeping laws aimed at improving police accountability, the legislation is intended to be prospective, said Sen. William C. Smith (D-Montgomery), chairman of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee.
“Our focus was ensuring from passing the legislation moving forward we had a more accountable process,” he said.
Brown this week did offer to help Bates’s office work around any potential conflict in a letter questioning why Bates is trying to hand off the case.
“Mr. West’s family has endured a truly tragic event, and I support the State’s Attorney’s Office in upholding its obligation to investigate the matter fairly and fully,” Brown wrote in a letter emailed to Bates on Thursday. Brown offered to assist Bates “in determining whether you have an actual conflict of interest that might prevent your entire office from investigating the case.
“If you’d like, we can also assist in creating or vetting a deconfliction policy to address the potential conflict that you believe might prevent you from investigating the death of Mr. West, and any future potential conflicts that routinely may arise in an office of your size,” he said.
In an interview this week, Bates’s chief of staff, Deputy State’s Attorney Angela G. Galeano, said a member of his office is a close relative of someone who worked on the original investigation into West’s death.
Jones, West’s sister, has spent the past decade calling on the state’s attorney or the attorney general to launch a new investigation into her brother’s case. She has repeatedly maintained that West, who was stopped by two plainclothes officers driving an unmarked car and later surrounded by more than a dozen officers, was killed by police.
Gregg L. Bernstein, the Baltimore state’s attorney at the time of West’s death, did not charge the officers. Marilyn Mosby did not reopen the case when she was state’s attorney.
At the time, an autopsy by the Maryland medical examiner’s office concluded West’s cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia from cardiac conduction system abnormality complicated by dehydration during police restraint. Fowler drew scrutiny for deeming the cause of death for George Floyd undetermined in court testimony for Derek Chauvin, linking it to heart disease and drug use rather than to his oxygen being cut off from the pressure of Chauvin’s knee.
Advocates who have pushed for changes in state laws to ensure transparency and police accountability say the responsibility ultimately rests with Bates.
“The public needs to understand that, when they are serious about it, local prosecutors always have the authority to pursue justice for survivors of police violence — and for those who did not survive,” Sonia Kumar, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Maryland, said in an email.