An Ohio man who was handcuffed and put facedown on the floor of a social club last week died while in police custody, and the officers involved have been placed on paid administrative leave.
A Canton officer responding to a collision report on Wednesday sees Frank Tyson, a 53-year-old East Canton man, outside a bar in a nearby American Veterans, or AMVETS, post, according to a police body-camera film.
Related posts
The incident occurred at 8 p.m. on April 18, severing a power pole. Officer Beau Schoenegge’s body camera footage reveals that after a passing driver directed police to the pub, a woman opened the door and said, “Please get him out of here, now.”
Police grabbed Tyson, who resisted handcuffs and repeatedly cried out, “They’re trying to kill me,” and “Call the sheriff,” as they carried him to the ground.
They restrained him, including placing a knee on his back, and he immediately told the authorities he couldn’t breathe. The Associated Press’s recent investigation revealed that previous police custody deaths had disregarded his “I can’t breathe” statements.
Officers told Tyson, who was facedown on the carpeted floor with his legs crossed, that he was alright to calm down and stop fighting. The police were joking with spectators and looking through Tyson’s wallet before recognizing he was in a medical crisis.
Five minutes after the body-camera film showed Tyson saying, “I can’t breathe,” one officer asked another if Tyson had calmed down. The other said, “He might be out.”
Tyson’s statement to cops that he could not breathe parallels the events leading up to George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020. The coroner’s office reported that Tyson was black. The Canton Police Agency reports that Schoenegge and Camden Burch, both traffic bureau officers on leave, are white.
Tyson refused to move when an officer ordered him to stand and attempted to roll him over. They shook him to check for a pulse.
Minutes later, an officer told medics to “step it up” because Tyson was not reacting and the officer was unsure if he could feel a pulse. Officers began CPR.
According to the Canton police report on Tyson’s death, “shortly after securing him,” officers “recognized that Tyson had become unresponsive” and began CPR. Before the medics arrived, they also administered Narcan. Less than an hour later, the hospital pronounced Tyson dead.
Chief Investigator Harry Campbell of the Stark County Coroner’s Office reports that they performed an autopsy earlier this week and released Tyson’s remains to a funeral home.
Jasmine Tyson, his niece, described the video as “nonsense” in an interview with WEWS-TV in Cleveland. “It just seemed like forever since they finally checked him,” Jasmine Tyson explained.
On April 6, state prison released Frank Tyson, who had spent 24 years in an abduction and larceny case. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction almost immediately labeled him as a post-release control monitoring offender for his failure to report to a parole officer.
A Tyson family member reached by phone on Thursday declined to comment.
According to a statement released Thursday by the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the investigation will not evaluate if force was justified, but rather whether charges related to the use of force are merited by the prosecuting attorney or a grand jury.
Canton Mayor William V. Sherer II stated that he personally extended his sympathies to Frank Tyson’s family.
“As we navigate this difficult time, my goal is to be as transparent with the community as possible,” Sherer said in a statement posted Wednesday.
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice has instructed police officers to turn prisoners off their stomachs as soon as they are shackled to avoid positional hypoxia.
Many policing experts believe that pinning someone to their chest for an extended period of time or with too much weight can cause the lungs to collapse and put stress on the heart. However, when done correctly, putting someone on their stomach is not necessarily dangerous.
More than 1,000 people died over a decade after police restrained them using non-lethal techniques like prone restraint, according to a March Associated Press study.
