Coconut Creek to Pay $750K: White Cops Beat & Tased [10x] Handcuffed Black Man to Death in Gated Community
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From [HERE] The tax payer price paid to settle a 2015 police stun-gun and beating death case that left an unarmed, restrained Black man dead: $750,000. [The white "public servants" won't have to pay a penny.]
Calvon “Andre” Reid died Feb. 24, 2015, two days after at least three white Coconut Creek police officers stunned him 10 times within 10 minutes with a 50,000-volt Tasers, according to the police Taser data. Two days later he died. The Police Department at first refused to acknowledge the incident ever happened. But within weeks Police Chief Michael Mann was forced to resign and three of the four officers under investigation were taken off road patrol. [MORE] All the cops and the chief are white.
Reid's family, which filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the police and the city, agreed to settle the case in May for $750,000. The previously undisclosed sum was revealed in city records Thursday after it was approved by the courts.
The case was scheduled for federal court in late December in Miami. Coconut Creek Police Chief Butch Arenal said at the time of settlement that the agency’s insurance company required the case be settled instead of going to trial. [Killer cops had no case and would be in prison for murder in an actual, real system of justice - the opposite of racism/white supremacy.]
The police's own probe or investigation of itself uncovered "absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing" according to the lawyer representing the officers. [MORE]
"Baby They're Gonna Kill Me." Reid’s encounter with police happened in the gated Wynmoor Village. Reid was under the influence of a combination of the street-drug flakka, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol, prosecutors said. [Why would journalists first mention facts from a prosecutor in a civil case? Because they are white. Racists believe that if Blacks or Latinos are high then anything that cops do to them is lawful. To racists, your rights don't exist when you're high because you're non-white. At any rate, cops could only guess about Reid's mental state when they encountered him in real time, on the street - tests were done after the fact in a lab. Reid's ability to recall what happened (b/c of impairment) might be relevant in a criminal assault case with no witnesses but he is dead now and this was a civil case with credible eyewitnesses.]
The Reid family’s attorney Jack Scarola says he suspects that because Reid was having a “severe drug reaction,” he scaled the fence at Wynmoor to seek help. When he climbed the fence, he injured himself, getting bloodied, Scarola said. “All the evidence suggests that’s what was going on,” he said. “It’s the best way to put the available pieces of the puzzle together.”
When paramedics arrived to the scene, they called police. [What racists really want to know is 'why was a Black man in this exclusive, gated white community in the first place?' Such persons are guilty by their mere existence. To the racist, there is no innocent Black male, just Black male criminals who have not yet been detected, apprehended or convicted. [MORE] Like the police chief says in the above video, "If you see any suspicious persons in your neighborhood please don't hesitate to call, we'll check it out." To racists, persons belonging to a different species [all non-whites] are inherently suspicious]
Because Reid had blood on him, the officers didn't know if he had committed a crime, and didn't want to leave based on his condition and appearance, officers told investigators. [Right, because if a Black person is bleeding then he must have committed a crime - right? Only if you believe in white supremacy/racism would this make sense to you! The white journalist [in photo] is oblivious to her own mental prison.]
The situation escalated quickly with stun guns being fired and Reid fighting back. [what was the 4th Amendment basis for cops to detain him? If he was under arrest then what was the crime?] Witnesses said they saw Reid being beaten. [regardless, like white jurors, white journalists believe almost anything white cops tell them - even though the witnesses were white. What's missing here are the following facts:
1) Wendy Ritter, a witness to the fatal encounter said she was home with her boyfriend, Marc Lamorte, that night. She was in the bathroom, he was in the kitchen. He ran out calling: "Somebody's being beaten," she recounted
"It was screaming, screaming like somebody was being beat," Lamorte said.
Ritter said they went outside and an officer asked if she knew Reid. Ritter said Reid was on his stomach on the ground, hands shackled behind his back. He looked at her and twice said, "They're gonna kill me!"
She and her boyfriend were ordered away. After they got upstairs, Lamorte again looked out on the walkway. "One of the cops says something to him and socks him," he said. "He hit him. Just bam. This guy was no threat to anybody, he was on the ground. He was tied. There's something wrong here."
2) Wynmoor resident Perry Weiss called 911 for an ambulance.
Weiss told the Sun Sentinel he was arriving home from a friend's house when Reid approached him in the parking lot with a torn shirt and torn pants. He was holding his right side.
"He came over to me and asked me, 'Will you take me to the hospital?'" Weiss recalled. Uneasy, Weiss declined. "He said, 'Okay, will you call 911 for me?' I said, 'Certainly, no problem.'"
Weiss called for help on his cell phone and assured Reid an ambulance was on its way. He didn't ask Reid how he got hurt or why he was in Wynmoor.
"He said to me, 'Will you stay with me?' I said, 'No, I can't, somebody's waiting for me,'" Weiss recalled.
Weiss said he left him in the parking lot, and didn't see the subsequent encounter with police. [how white folks do]
3) In another eyewitness account, Bonnie Eshleman said four officers surrounded Reid and one pinned him to the ground, threatening to break his arm. Another hit him with something, possibly a stick or baton.
She testified in a sworn affidavit that he was calling out, "Baby, baby, baby, help, they're gonna kill me!" She said an unidentified woman stood about 25 yards away, watching. She also heard him scream, "I can't breathe!"
Eshleman said two officers lifted Reid up on his feet. "He took a few steps forward in what appeared to be an attempt to get away from these officers," she said. Then, she said, two officers standing 10 feet away simultaneously shot him with stun guns. The other two officers threw him face down onto the grass and he again hollered, "I can't breathe!"
Eshleman said he stopped moving. One of the officers asked another, "Is he breathing?" They rolled him on his back. One officer called a paramedic who performed CPR. Reid did not respond, she said.
"After the paramedics stopped performing CPR on Mr. Reid they displayed no urgency transferring him to a gurney and they casually rolled him away to their ambulance," she said. "When they departed the scene, they slowly drove away and didn't turn on their flashing overhead lights."
She disputes police claims that Reid was "aggressive." She said he was not disrespectful, and it was police who were physically and verbally aggressive. "It appeared Mr. Reid just wanted to be left alone," she said.
Weiss supported that account. "He was calm, he was pleasant, he didn't argue," he said. "He wasn't looking to do any harm to me, he needed help. He didn't get wild or noisy.
"Maybe I should have stayed with him," Weiss said. "Hindsight is easier then foresight." Probably would have stayed for a white man? Racism is a virus in the mind.]
Days after Reid's death, city and police officials refused to acknowledge that the incident even occurred. The Sun Sentinel confirmed the death through public records from the Medical Examiner's Office. His family said police told them he was stunned three times. Michael Mann, the former police chief, first spoke publicly of the incident more than a week after it happened. [MORE]
Police have said there is no video from their cruiser dash cam of the encounter [and white journalists & prosecutors believe whatever white cops tell them]. The Medical Examiner’s Office ruled it a homicide.
Scarola was set to argue in court during his civil trial that the officers violated Taser guidelines, and that the agency’s failure to train officers directly led to Reid’s death.
One of the officers said in his taped deposition he thought he could use a stun gun as many times as it took to control somebody. But guidelines prohibit repeated stun-gun applications.
According to the officer’s Taser data recorded on each device, Reid received 50 seconds of voltage — 30 seconds of that was in less than a minute. Two of the officers used stun guns on him while he was on the ground, and one used the device on him while he was in handcuffs and face down on the ground, Scarola said, citing Taser data, police officer statements and eyewitness testimony.
White prosecutors filed no charges after a grand jury decided [at their limp wristed direction] not to criminally charge the white officers. Ron Ishoy, spokesman for the Broward State Attorney's Office, said Reid was under the influence of a combination of the street-drug flakka, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol.
"These drugs, coupled with a pre-existing condition of an enlarged heart, contributed to his death upon officers deploying the electroshock weapons in an attempt to control his aggressive behavior toward the officers," he said in a statement. [MORE]
The family’s lawsuit was filed in September 2015. The settlement money is set aside in annuities for Reid’s two young sons, he said. They’ll have financial security “they would have been deprived of from the death of their father,” Scarola said.
He said this will help bring closure to the family. “There is absolutely no justification for putting an individual — who is seeking the help of law enforcement — putting that individual to death by electrocution in the hands of untrained police officers,” Scarola said. “There is no excuse for what happened to Calvon Reid.”
