A mother whose son was having a seizure in his Tennessee apartment said in a federal lawsuit that police and paramedics subjected the 23-year-old to “inhumane acts of violence” instead of treating him, then covered up their use of deadly force.
The death of Austin Hunter Turner was one of more than 1,000 nationally that an investigation led by The Associated Press identified as happening after police officers used physical force or weapons that were supposed to stop, but not kill, people.
The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court, came after AP reporters shared police body-camera video they had unearthed with Turner’s parents, who didn’t know it existed. That footage made the family doubt the official conclusion that a drug overdose killed their son.
Citing the AP’s reporting and many of the details it disclosed, the lawsuit focused on how officers’ own video contradicted the police version of what happened inside Turner’s small apartment in the northeastern Tennessee city of Bristol.
Cops, in the US at least, are the “catch all” emergency service. There’s more of them and they are in smaller, faster vehicles than the fire department or EMS.
Police get dispatched to a lot of things first to “assess the situation” because they can arrive faster, and it shows that something is being done because someone has shown up, even though it may take twice as long before an ambulance gets there.