From [HERE] Lafayette police officers Joshua Saxton, Nicholas Klimek and Victor Sikorski will not face charges for the May 9, 2020, K9 mauling that left Richard Bailey Jr. in a coma for 6 days at an Indianapolis hospital.

Mary Hutchison was appointed special prosecutor in June 2020 to investigate if the mauling was excessive force by K9 Officer Saxton as Klimek and Sikorski stood by and watched. 

Hutchison filed a report June 1 recommending that charges not be filed, but Hutchison was no longer a prosecutor, according to arguments presented during a June 24 hearing on the report. 

Since Hutchison was no longer a prosecutor for the state of Indiana, she could not serve in the role of special prosecutor, according to arguments filed in June.

Tippecanoe Circuit Judge Sean Persin agreed in his ruling and appointed David Thomas, a senior prosecuting attorney [racist suspect in photo] from St. Mary of the Woods, Indiana.

On July 7, Thomas filed notice with the court that he did not intend to pursue charges against the officers.

The state police investigate stemmed from the May 9, 2020, arrest of Bailey, who is seen on police body camera video refusing to get off of his moped as requested by officers.

At the time, Bailey was a suspect in a battery reported in the 3600 block of Brampton Drive. However, it is not clear whether the cops had a 4th Amendment basis to arrest him because they did not see him commit any crimes.

When Officer Saxton arrived at the scene, Bailey is heard on the video loudly asking, “What probable cause do you have, sir?”

“He’s a suspect in a battery,” Saxton said, according to his body cam. “If he’s going to act like that, he can be detained.”

Saxton said, “Hey. There’s a dog in that car. If you fight, you’re going to get dog bit.”

Officers then pry Bailey’s hands from the scooter’s handlebars and throw him to the ground. Saxton the hits a remote door opener, and his police dog runs to them, latches on the Bailey's neck and mauls him for 30 seconds, according to the body camera video.

Before Bailey could even react, police released the dog who went straight for the man’s neck.

“Here! Here! Here!” Saxton called to his dog. “Right here!”

The dog latched on and tore into Bailey’s neck for over 30 seconds — easily enough time to kill the man. Bailey tried to stop the dog from tearing apart his neck, but he was unsuccessful.

“Stop moving!” the officer yells at a man whose neck is being shredded by the K-9. As the dog viciously mauls his neck the white cop has the audacity to order “put your hands behind your back.” When the Black man stops moving the white cop grabs the dog to stop him from biting. He says, “good job.”

During that mauling, Saxton's dog punctured Bailey's trachea, cut his carotid artery, damaged Bailey's tissue in his neck, injured Bailey's shoulder and broke his finger, according to medical records provided last year to the Journal & Courier.

“I wasn’t fighting the dog,” Bailey insisted. “All I did was reach up and grabbed the dog’s mouth ‘cause he’s on my throat. That was the natural reaction. I’m not fighting the dog or trying to hurt the dog. The dog’s hurting me.”

That’s about all Bailey remembers. He would wake up six days later after slipping into a coma with a tube in his throat.

Bailey recorded what the doctor told him during a follow up and the description is chilling to say the least.

“The dog, when he bit you, lacerated your windpipe, … and it had hit the main artery that goes to your brain on this side (left). And that’s completely blocked off,” the doctor said on the recording.

“You had a tear in your trachea,” the doctor said. “What I did, I fixed where they put the tube in so you could breathe. Then we put this in through the injury site.

“Then the rest was just muscle and other tissue that had been torn apart, and we put that back together again.”

“They must have been trying to kill Richard Bailey that night, they must have been,” said one of his lawyers, Fatima Johnson. “If a dog bites your neck, its obvious what’s going to happen.”

Bailey's attorneys called the use of the dog, which mauled Bailey's neck for 30 seconds, “extraordinarily violent” and said the three white officers used excessive force because Bailey is Black, according to the Journal & Courier. They said the 46-year-old Bailey spent days in a medically-induced coma after the attack and could have died.

“The force was just extraordinarily violent,” another of Bailey’s attorneys, Swaray Conteh, said in an exclusive interview with the Journal & Courier. “They didn’t have to do that. Two of them could have placed him in handcuffs and took him wherever they wanted to. They didn’t need the assistance of a K9.”

In the wake of the Journal & Courier breaking the news about the attack, including the first to publish the body camera video, Lafayette Police Chief Patrick Flannelly [also white] released a video explaining the police department's stance.

In March, Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings was appointed by Persin to investigate whether charges should be filed against Bailey.

On June 3, Cummings filed 11 charges against Bailey. They are: criminal confinement, battery with a deadly weapon, battery with moderate injury, strangulation, intimidation, resisting law enforcement, interfering with reporting a crime, criminal mischief, public intoxication and two counts of battery.

Bailey, 47, 2825-B Dorssett Drive, Lafayette, posted bond June 22 and was released from the Tippecanoe County Jail, according to jail records.