Mississippi Today

New Evidence Raises Questions in Controversial Mississippi Law Enforcement Killing

Published

9 months ago

August 22, 2023

When Damien Cameron's body arrived at the Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office in August 2021, it bore all the signs of a police brutality case.

Mr. Cameron's face was bloody and swollen almost beyond recognition from his struggle with Rankin County sheriff's deputies the week before.

Signs of internal bleeding on the side of the neck of Mr. Cameron, a 29-year-old Black man, suggested a deputy might have pinned him to the ground with a knee — a dangerous restraint technique condemned by the Justice Department and banned in many cities.

But when the state's chief medical examiner, Dr. Staci Turner, completed her autopsy, she ruled the cause of Mr. Cameron's death “undetermined.” A grand jury later declined to indict the deputies involved.

Now, three renowned pathologists, who examined the case at the request of The New York Times and Mississippi Today, say Mr. Cameron's death should have been ruled a homicide.

After independently reviewing autopsy photos, sheriff's reports, hospital records and eyewitness statements saying two deputies knelt on Mr. Cameron's neck for 10 minutes or more, the experts concluded the deputies most likely killed him.

His death was “a homicide, absolutely,” said Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner who testified in the O.J. Simpson trial and performed an independent autopsy of George Floyd. “This person died of asphyxia because of neck compression.”

“There's really nothing to be undetermined about,” said Dr. Zhongxue Hua, chief of the forensic pathology division at Rutgers University.

Damien Cameron's family photographed him in the hospital shortly before he died from the injuries he sustained during his arrest by Rankin County deputies. Credit: Courtesy of Damien Cameron's family

The opinions of these forensic experts give new ammunition to Mr. Cameron's family, who have struggled to bring attention to his death for more than two years. Despite local media coverage and two ?articles by the news site Insider, Mr. Cameron's death never surfaced nationally like the cases of George Floyd or Eric Garner.

Mr. Cameron's mother, Monica Lee, described her son as an outgoing young man who could quickly turn strangers into friends with his smile. Ms. Lee has always maintained that the deputies killed her son by violently subduing him and ignoring his cries that he could not breathe. She predicted the investigation into his death “was going to be a bunch of lies.”

Ms. Lee sued the department in 2022.

Her lawyer, Malik Shabazz, said the conclusions of the independent pathologists could change the outcome of Ms. Lee's case. “There's serious questions about the competency and the accuracy of the autopsy findings,” he said.

Mr. Cameron is one of at least nine men who have died during episodes involving Rankin deputies since 2014, according to department records and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports.

Rankin County, a rural, majority-white community outside Jackson, has been rocked by national controversy this year after five sheriff's deputies and a local police officer broke into the home of two Black men, tortured them for two hours, sexually assaulted them with a sex toy and then shot one of them in the mouth.

Former Rankin County law enforcement officer Hunter Elward, enters Rankin County Circuit Court, where he pled guilty to all charges before Judge Steve Ratcliff, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023 in Brandon. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today

On Aug. 3, Deputy Hunter Elward admitted to sticking his gun in 32-year-old Michael Jenkins's mouth and firing it. He and the other officers, who are all white, concealed their crimes by planting a gun and drugs on their victims, disposing of security camera footage and falsifying sheriff's reports, according to an investigation by the Justice Department. All of the officers pleaded guilty to federal and state charges in the case.

“Obviously these officers can't be trusted,” said Sean Tindell, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. “There's probably going to be a lot of reviews of every case that they've ever worked on.”

Mr. Elward was one of the two deputies accused of kneeling on Mr. Cameron the day he died.

A violent arrest

The only witnesses to Mr. Cameron's arrest on July 26, 2021, were the deputies, Ms. Lee and her parents.

That afternoon, a neighbor called the police to report a burglary he believed Mr. Cameron had committed at his home in a quiet, rural neighborhood near Braxton, Miss., court records show.

When Deputy Elward arrived to investigate, Mr. Cameron, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, swung at him and ran away, according to the sheriff's report.

Deputy Elward fired his Taser and tackled Mr. Cameron, he claimed in his sheriff's report, punching him three times in the face before Deputy Luke Stickman arrived to help subdue and arrest the man.

Mr. Cameron continued to resist the deputies as they led him outside and shoved him in a patrol car, Deputy Elward contended in his report.

Shortly after, he found Mr. Cameron unresponsive. Paramedics took him to University of Mississippi Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Mr. Cameron's family said they witnessed a drastically different encounter.

In interviews with reporters, Ms. Lee said her son never tried to hit the deputy.

Hours after the incident, Mr. Cameron's grandfather told Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agents that he had witnessed a deputy placing his knee on his grandson's neck as he lay on the ground. The deputies did not mention kneeling on Mr. Cameron in their reports.

Ms. Lee told reporters that Deputies Elward and Stickman knelt on Mr. Cameron's neck and back for at least 10 minutes.

“He was telling me he couldn't breathe, he couldn't breathe,” she said.

Mr. Cameron's mother told reporters that he struggled to walk as the deputies took him to the patrol car and that he fell facedown in the mud in front of it.

There is no video footage of the incident.

In a written statement, Sheriff Bryan Bailey said the department had yet to deploy body-worn cameras when Mr. Cameron was arrested. Mississippi does not require law enforcement agencies to use them.

Monica Lee points to the side of her house where she alleges the Rankin County Sheriff's Department beat her son, Damien Cameron, on July 30, 2023. Lee claims the department used excessive force and delivered life-ending injuries to her 29-year-old son in 2021. Credit: Rory Doyle for The New York Times

Without footage to prove her claims, Ms. Lee hoped her son's autopsy would finally reveal the truth about his death.

But after the medical examiner's report came back “undetermined,” the Rankin County District Attorney's Office declined to charge the deputies. District Attorney John Bramlett, known as Bubba, did not return calls seeking comment about why he did not pursue charges.

Monica Lee wears a necklace dedicated to her late son, Damien Cameron, in Braxton, Miss. on July 30, 2023. Credit: Rory Doyle for The New York Times

“It was heartbreaking,” Ms. Lee said. “This is what you do every day, and you could not determine his cause of death? Why?”

Medical examiners' findings serve as the legal foundation for prosecutors to file charges against officers involved in fatal incidents, legal experts said.

“The only person in a homicide case who can testify to the ultimate issue — that the manner of death was homicide — is a medical examiner,” said Aramis Ayala, a former Florida state attorney and a professor at Florida A&M University School of Law.

Prosecutors rarely pursue homicide charges against police officers. Without an official cause of death, experts said the chances of persuading a grand jury to indict an officer ?were slim.

A death unexplained

Dr. Turner declined to discuss the details of Mr. Cameron's autopsy, but said there was nothing unusual about her decision not to cite a cause of death.

In cases where her office is missing information or can't definitively cite a cause, “we err on the side of ‘undetermined' because we don't want to make a mistake,” she said.

Dr. Turner would not comment on what police documents and witness statements she had access to when she performed the autopsy. But in her report she wrote, “Due to lack of access to information involving the circumstance of this death, the cause and manner of death are best classified as undetermined.”

All three independent forensic pathologists said the medical examiner should have tracked down (gotten) the information she needed to make a determination. The hemorrhaging in Mr. Cameron's neck made it clear he died of asphyxiation, they said.

“They should not have signed it on as undetermined and let it go,” said Dr. Cyril Wecht, former president of the American College of Legal Medicine and the American Academy of Forensic Science. “That was up to them to get more information from the cops.”

A toxicology report found methamphetamine in Mr. Cameron's blood, but the pathologists~~? ?~~ agreed that the drug did not cause his death.

Representatives of the medical examiner's office said the agency would review the case again if asked by the Mississippi attorney general or the local district attorney's office.

“It was undetermined,” said Mr. Tindell, the public safety department commissioner. “That doesn't mean it can't be determined later.”

In a written response to The Times, Sheriff Bailey said his department cooperated with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation's inquiry, noting that the bureau found no wrongdoing.

“If requested, we will fully cooperate with any future investigation into this incident by any investigative agency,” Sheriff Bailey wrote.

Mr. Shabazz said he planned to consult with the pathologists and update Ms. Lee's lawsuit to include their findings. He hopes the new information will prompt state officials to review the case again.

Ms. Lee said she just wants the world to know the truth.

“This is what they did to my child,” she said. “You can't tell me it was undetermined.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1917

Published

8 hours ago

May 5, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-05-05 07:00:00

May 5, 1917

Eugene Jacques Bullard, seen here in uniform in World War I, was the first African-American combat pilot. Credit: Wikipedia

Eugene Jacques Bullard became the first Black American combat pilot.

After the near lynching of his father and hearing that Great Britain lacked such racism, the 12-year-old Georgia native stowed away on a ship headed for Scotland. From there, he moved to Liverpool, England, where he handled odd jobs before becoming a boxer, traveling across Europe before he settled in Paris.

“It seems to me that the French democracy influenced the minds of both White and Black Americans there and helped us all to act like brothers as near as possible,” he said. “It convinced me, too, that God really did create all men equal, and it was easy to live that way.”

When World War I began, he was too young to fight for his adopted country, so he and other American expatriates joined the French Foreign Legion. Through a series of battles, he was wounded, and doctors believed he would never walk again.

No longer able to serve in the infantry, an American friend bet him $2,000 that he could not get into aviation. Taking on the challenge, he earned his “wings” and began fighting for the French Aéronautique Militaire.

He addressed racism with words on his plane, “All Blood Runs Red,” and he nicknamed himself, “The Black Swallow of Death.”

On his flights, he reportedly took along a Rhesus monkey named “Jimmy.” He tried to join the U.S. Air Service, only to be turned away because he was Black. He became one of France's most decorated war heroes, earning the French Legion of Honor.

After the war he bought a Paris nightclub, where Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong performed and eventually helped French officials ferret out Nazi sympathizers. After World War II ended, he moved to Harlem, but his widespread fame never followed him back to the U.S.

In 1960, when French President Charles de Gaulle visited, he told government officials that he wanted to see his old friend, Bullard. No one in the government knew where Bullard was, and the FBI finally found him in an unexpected place — working as an elevator operator at the Rockefeller Center in New York City.

After de Gaulle's visit, he appeared on “The Today Show,” which was shot in the same building where he worked.

Upon his death from cancer in 1961, he was buried with honors in the French War Veterans' section of the Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York.

A sculpture of Bullard can be viewed in the Smithsonian National Space and Air Museum in Washington, D.C., a statue of him can be found outside the Museum of Aviation, and an exhibit on him can be seen inside the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, which posthumously gave him the rank of a second lieutenant. He is loosely portrayed in the 2006 film, “Flyboys.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

A seat at table for Democrats might have gotten Medicaid expansion across the finish line

Published

9 hours ago

May 5, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Bobby Harrison – 2024-05-05 06:00:00

The Mississippi Capitol is 171,000 square feet, granted a massive structure, but when it comes to communication between the two legislative chambers that occupy the building, it might as well be as big as the cosmos.

Such was the case in recent days during the intense and often combustible process that eventually led to the death of Medicaid expansion and with that the loss of the opportunity to provide health care for 200,000 working poor Mississippians with the federal government paying the bulk of the cost.

Democrats in the state House came under intense pressure and criticism for blocking a Medicaid expansion compromise reached by Republican House and Senate negotiators.

First of all, it would be disingenuous to argue that Democrats, who compose less than one-third of the membership of either chamber, blocked any proposal. Truth be known, Republicans should be able to pass anything they want without a solitary Democratic vote.

But on this particular issue, the Republican legislative leadership who finally decided that Medicaid expansion would be good for the state needed the votes of the minority party, which incidentally had been working for 10 years to pass Medicaid expansion. The reason their votes were needed is that many Republicans, despite the wishes of their leaders, still oppose Medicaid expansion.

The breakdown in the process could be attributed to the decision of the two presiding officers, House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann in the Senate, not to appoint a single Democrat to the all-important conference committee.

Conference committees are formed of three senators and three House members who work out the differences between the two chambers on a bill. Considering that Democratic votes were needed in both chambers to pass Medicaid expansion, and considering Democrats had been working on the issue for a decade while Republicans blocked it, it would have made sense that they had a seat at the table in the final negotiations process.

One Democrat from each chamber on the conference committee could not have altered the outcome of the negotiations. But the two Democrats could have provided input on what their fellow legislative Democrats would accept and vote for.

In the eyes of the Democrats, the compromise reached without their voice being heard was unworkable and would not have resulted in Medicaid expansion.

The Republican compromise said Medicaid would not be expanded until the federal government provided a waiver mandating those on Medicaid expansion were working. Similar work requirement requests by other states have been denied. Under the compromise, if the work requirement was rejected by federal officials, Medicaid expansion would not occur in Mississippi.

After voicing strong objections to the work requirement, House Minority Leader Rep. Robert Johnson, recognizing the Senate would not budge from the work requirement, offered a compromise. The Johnson compromise to the compromise was to remove a provision mandating the state apply annually with federal officials for the work requirement.

Instead, under Johnson's proposal, state Medicaid officials would be mandated to apply just once for the work requirement. If it was rejected, Medicaid expansion would not occur, but hopefully that would compel the Legislature to take up the issue of the work requirement and perhaps remove it.

“We just want the Legislature to come back and have a conversation next year if the federal government doesn't approve the work requirement. It's as simple as that,” Johnson said.

Senate leaders agreed that Johnson's proposal was a simple ask and something they might consider.

But Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said he never heard Johnson's proposal until late in the process — too late in the process, as it turned out.

Speaker Jason White, R-West, also said he never heard the proposal, though Johnson said he repeatedly discussed it with House leaders. He certainly was relaying the information to the media during the final hectic days before Medicaid expansion died.

And perhaps if Johnson or one of his Democratic colleagues had been on the conference committee, that information would have been heard by the right legislative people and perhaps Medicaid expansion would not have died.

After all, a conference room or an office where negotiators are meeting to hammer out a compromise is much smaller than the massive state Capitol, where communications often get lost in the cosmos.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1884

Published

1 day ago

May 4, 2024

Staff Editor

May 4, 1884

Photo of Ida B. Wells, circa 1893 Credit: Courtesy of National Park Service

Crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, an African-American native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, was riding a train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, where she worked as a teacher, when a white railroad conductor ordered her to move to another car. She refused.

When the conductor grabbed her by the arm, “I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand,” she wrote.

The conductor got help from others, who dragged her off the train.

In response, she sued the railroad, saying the company forced Black Americans to ride in “separate but unequal” coaches. A local judge agreed, awarding her $500 in damages.

But the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed that ruling three years later. The decision upended her belief in the court system.

“I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed it, give us justice,” she said. “I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.”

Wells knew about caring for others. At age 16, she raised her younger siblings after her parents and a brother died in a yellow fever epidemic. She became a teacher to support her family.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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