From [HERE] Y’all are here to protect me, right?” The family of Cedric Lofton has filed a lawsuit in federal court following his death in September of 2021.

“More than anything we want to see prosecution. We want to show That you can’t get away with this. That the police can’t get away with what they did,” said Marquan Teetz.

The lawsuit filed in federal court aims to hold individual officers, supervisors and both Wichita and Sedgwick counties responsible for Lofton’s death.

Attorneys and activists called for a separate Department of Justice investigation into what happened. The complaint overview states,

“17-year-old Cedric Lofton is dead because of the actions, inaction, conscious disregard, willful and wanton, and depraved behavior of officers in Sedgwick County and the Wichita Police Department. This is a civil rights action to recover for Cedric’s tragic, unnecessary, and untimely death.”

The complaint sets forth the following facts:

In the early morning hours of September 24, 2021, Cedric returned to his foster home after leaving without notice a day earlier. Cedric’s grandmother had recently passed away and upon Cedric’s return, his foster father was concerned about Cedric’s mental health.

Seeking guidance with concern, Cedric’s foster father called the Kansas Department of Children and Families (“DCF”). DCF told him to call the police and to not let Cedric in the home. The purpose of this instruction was to obtain a mental health evaluation and treatment for Cedric. This is why the Wichita police were called. Cedric had committed no crime; he was a child returning innocently home.

WPD officers arrived and encountered Cedric outside his foster home. Cedric was tired and afraid. He showed no signs of violence and presented no harm or danger. It was immediately clear that he was experiencing a mental health crisis, telling WPD officers that he was worried people were trying to “kill” him and that all he wanted to do was to go inside his home and go to sleep. Cedric asked the officers, “Y’all are here to protect me, right?”

This foster child needed help. But rather than provide it, WPD officers physically confronted him, unnecessarily escalated a benign scenario, arrested him, and entombed him in a WRAP restraint system — effectively a full-body straitjacket. The use of the WRAP predictably and inexcusably exacerbated Cedric’s fear and paranoia.

Worse, WPD did not then take Cedric to a hospital for mental health evaluation and treatment. Instead, they brought him to Sedgwick County’s Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center (“JIAC”)—a kind of juvenile detention—and locked him in a holding room still in the WRAP restraint. In other words, even though the entire point of WPD’s involvement was to get Cedric help and even though he had committed no crime, WPD refused to obtain help and treated Cedric like a violent criminal. This despite the fact that one officer admitted: “For me, I think we should have taken [Cedric] to [the hospital at] St. Joe [for treatment].”

Worse still, when confronted with JIAC’s intake questioning about whether Cedric required medical treatment, WPD intentionally falsified their response and swore that he needed no such treatment, knowing that was exactly what was needed and required. Indeed, a JIAC intake officer witnessed a WPD officer change his response to the intake form when he learned it would trigger WPD’s obligation to transport Cedric for treatment. As such, the officer prioritized his own convenience at the expense of this child’s welfare. And JIAC officials knowingly permitted it.

Within a few hours, Cedric was dead. Following a brief altercation, Cedric died after several JIAC officers forced him to the floor in the prone position and pinned him on his stomach for 39 uninterrupted minutes until he stopped breathing. The smiling child photographed above was condemned to die hooked to life-supporting tubes in a hospital bed, shown here:

Cedric posed no threat to anyone — not least of which the five able-bodied, adult officers who cycled-in and out of the room during Cedric’s slow death. These JIAC officers perpetrated a prolonged and abhorrent case of excessive force on a 135-pound, shoeless, shackled, and unarmed juvenile in the obvious throes of a mental health crisis.

Months later, the Sedgwick County medical examiner determined that Cedric was killed as a result of this incident and concluded that Cedric’s death was a “homicide.”

Governor Kelly directed DFC to “thoroughly investigate his case to ensure policy and procedures were properly followed, and to determine if these procedures need to be changed or refined.” The Sedgewick County prosecutor declined to press charges saying Kansas “Stand Your Ground” law allows people to protect themselves.

At least in regard to white citizens, “Stand your ground” law would be inapplicable here as “A person is justified in the use of deadly force under circumstances where a person reasonably believes that such use of deadly force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to such person or a third person.” [MORE] Here, no facts have been alleged that the black teen posed an imminent threat of death to jail authorities as he was crushed to death for 39 minutes while prone on the floor.