Associated Press
Sitting alone in her car, Jen Dold was crying too hard to drive. She had just received a manila envelope with her brother’s autopsy report.
There it was, one devastating word: “accident.” The papers trembled in her hands.
Their mother had called 911 for help getting Dold’s 29-year-old brother, Alex, to the hospital because he was in a mental health crisis. Four sheriff’s deputies and two police officers shocked him with Tasers, wrapped an arm around his neck, punched and kicked him, then left him face down until they noticed he wasn’t breathing.
How could that be an accident? Dold was certain it was a homicide.
Angry and grieving in the parking lot outside the county medical examiner’s office 30 miles north of Seattle, Dold vowed to fight.
“No more silence or complacency,” she thought. “No sweeping it under the rug.”
In the United States, police rarely face criminal charges when civilians die after officers use physical force. Whether they do can depend on a system that operates after the initial attention passes: medical examiners and coroners who decide how and why someone died — what’s known as the manner and cause of death.
On TV dramas such as “CSI” or “Bones,” facts and established science determine whether a death was an accident or homicide. In reality, medical investigations involving police restraint deaths can be so riddled with inconsistencies, suspect science or conflicts of interest that even extensive force may matter little, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found.
That investigation identified 1,036 deaths over a decade after police used not their guns but physical blows, restraints or weapons such as Tasers that aren’t supposed to kill. Some people were causing little or no trouble, while others were committing violent crimes. Many died after officers broke widely known safety practices, or after medics injected them with powerful knock-out drugs, sometimes at the urging of police.
Accident was the most common conclusion of medical investigations in AP’s case database. Accidental rulings typically blamed preexisting conditions such as obesity or asthma, or drug use — even when in some cases blood testing did not detect lethal levels. Others faulted “excited delirium,” a controversial diagnosis discredited by major medical associations. Some medical officials based their decisions not on physical evidence, but instead on whether they believed police intended to kill.
Manner of death decisions are so pivotal that members of law enforcement and their allies push to shape them, with the multibillion-dollar company behind Tasers peppering medical officials with research it funded or wrote that downplays the dangers of its weapon.
The degree of physical and professional separation a medical official had from local law enforcement appeared to affect rulings. Deaths were ruled accidents more frequently when medical examiners or coroners were in the same community as the department under investigation, or when they fell under the control of law enforcement.
The mere location of a death has huge sway because each state designs its own system. Even within a state, county lines can matter. Death decisions are made in some places by doctors trained as forensic pathologists, in others by an elected coroner who may have no medical training and deep ties to local law enforcement.
“I call it a crazy quilt,” said Dr. Victor Weedn, the former chief medical examiner of Maryland who has written about failed attempts to bring national consistency. Concerned about medical examiners’ independence in police-involved deaths, he advocates for state health departments to take charge.
When deaths are ruled accidental, prosecutions of officers are exceedingly rare — of the 443 cases the AP identified, just two resulted in criminal charges. A family’s chances of winning a wrongful death lawsuit also become much tougher.
“I had a belief that the justice system was fair, that if you were a victim you’d get justice, and the perpetrator would be convicted of their crime — police officer or not,” Jen Dold said. “Sadly, we realized this was not the case.”
A matter of intent
Jen Dold — 11 years older than Alex — had been more like a doting mother to him growing up. When his schizophrenia began at 19, and he started to believe people were whispering and lurking outside his house, she became his primary caregiver, shuttling him around and helping him financially.
One night in 2017, Alex Dold had an argument with his mother. He was in his late-20s, unemployed, living with her and off his medication. She had refused to give him more than his daily $30 from federal disability payments. So he yanked a lanyard around her neck, flipped the living room recliner where she sat, and left.
The county mental health department wouldn’t send someone, saying Dold wasn’t violent enough.
When Dold returned and sat down to watch television like nothing had happened, his mother called 911. She told the dispatcher her son was calm, yet needed hospital treatment.
Two Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies arrived. Dold acknowledged getting physical, but insisted his mother was fine and tried to close the front door.
Many police are trained to calm people in mental crisis. Instead, Deputy Bryson McGee pushed inside. McGee would later say Dold punched his face, something Dold’s mother, Kathy Duncan, who witnessed the interaction, denied.
Four backup officers joined the fight. Over 12 minutes, the group punched, kicked and hit Dold with a baton, shocked him with Tasers, pressed a knee to his face and pushed his head down with a flashlight, according to a 990-page police report.
Dold said he was submitting and cried out for his mother, who screamed that her son was mentally ill.
“It was the worst yelling, shouting I’ve ever heard,” one neighbor told an investigator.
After handcuffing Dold in the driveway, deputies left him face down, a position the Justice Department and others have long warned carries a suffocation risk. No one started proper resuscitation for at least 10 minutes.
Jen Dold didn’t trust the investigation from the beginning. The detectives who interviewed her focused on her brother’s mental illness, she thought to protect officers.
Seeking an ally, she contacted Snohomish County’s chief medical examiner, and was relieved when Dr. Daniel Selove told her by phone that he’d weigh police force.
Yet when Selove met her at his office, he explained that Dold died from an irregular heartbeat. While the Taser shocks and struggle were significant factors, Selove said, he didn’t believe the officers intended to kill her brother, so his death was an accident.
Whether to consider intent is a philosophical divide among forensic pathologists. Dold’s death illustrates how unevenly intent can be applied — Selove used it even though under his own office’s policies intent “need not be present or proven” for a homicide ruling.
For coroners and medical examiners, homicide doesn’t carry the same meaning as murder does in criminal law. Guidelines from the National Association of Medical Examiners say intent is a valid consideration, but restraint deaths may be classified as homicide without it — and doing so has “some value” to reduce any appearance of a cover-up.
Dr. J. Keith Pinckard, the organization’s president, said manner of death is an opinion meant to be used for vital statistics and public health, not a legal determination. Nonetheless, it has influence in court.
The significance of an accidental ruling quickly became clear when the local prosecutor cited it in exonerating the deputies and officers. It was one example among dozens AP found in which prosecutors referenced autopsy outcomes to close investigations, including other cases involving severe force.
Jen Dold figured the last chance to hold the deputies in her brother’s death accountable was a lawsuit.
Looking for a lawyer, the family found a promising lead. Seven years before her brother’s death, Deputy McGee — the first one into Dold’s home — had fired his Taser in a fatal struggle with another man in mental distress. Dold was not his first death on duty.
The county had settled that family’s lawsuit. The Dolds contacted the lawyer, who took their case but cautioned litigation would be arduous. Officers get protections, including qualified immunity, which shield them from liability. The accidental manner of death would not help.
As the lawsuit ground on, the attorney discovered something intriguing. The day after Alex Dold’s autopsy, Selove fired the doctor who did it.
Now it was February 2022. Jen Dold huddled with her mother and sister around a laptop to watch their attorney question Dr. Stanley Adams, a forensic pathologist who worked for the U.S. military before Snohomish County.
Their lawyer asked Adams to review Dold’s autopsy report. For the first time, Adams learned that, after he was fired, Selove had changed his conclusion from homicide and labeled it an accident.
“I have a little bit of heartburn with that because he took my correct answer and he changed it to an incorrect answer,” Adams said.
“Why do you say it’s a homicide?” the lawyer asked.
“Because when one human being does an action or neglects to do an action that caused the death of another, it really doesn’t matter about the intent,” Adams replied.
The family hugged.
“We just kept saying, ‘Did he really just say that? Did he really just say ‘homicide’?” Jen Dold recalled.
Adams told AP that under the settlement he reached over his termination, he couldn’t discuss his employment. But in a complaint filed with Snohomish County, Adams wrote he was fired for documenting Selove’s violations of county policies and guidelines of the National Association of Medical Examiners. ...
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