By Jeff McDonald

Michael Keeler was at his parents’ home in Fallbrook in February of last year when he noticed four San Diego sheriff’s deputies walking toward the house.

He approached the deputies to ask what he could do for them.

Moments later Keeler was told they had a warrant for his arrest, and he was handcuffed and placed into a chokehold for allegedly resisting arrest, according to a new lawsuit filed against the San Diego Sheriff’s Department.

“Plaintiff Michael Keeler — an African-American man — was subjected to excessive force by a San Diego sheriff’s deputy, specifically, a chokehold, or ‘carotid neck restraint’,” the lawsuit states.

Three deputies stood by while one employed the neck restraint, the suit said.

Sheriff Bill Gore banned the use of chokeholds department-wide in June 2020, days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“Unfortunately, the incident was not isolated,” the U.S. District Court complaint said of Keeler’s arrest. “The San Diego Sheriff’s Department has a long and troubled history of its deputies using force against minorities at a greatly disproportional rate.”

Keeler was arrested and booked into jail. Keeler’s parents posted bail the next day and took their son straight to a hospital. He had bruising and swelling on his neck and injury to his wrists due to the handcuffs, the lawsuit said.

Keeler, who was never charged in the Feb. 6, 2020 incident and has no criminal record in San Diego County, died of an unrelated illness in June 2020. He was 32.

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Lt. Amber Baggs said the department investigated what happened at the Fallbrook house and concluded that the four deputies did nothing wrong.

Keeler “was contacted as a possible no bail warrant suspect,” Baggs said by email. “During the detention, Mr. Keeler pulled away from deputies who were attempting to place him into handcuffs.”

The Sheriff’s Department said Keeler was found in possession of suspected Oxycodone and Xanax. Prosecutors later declined to file criminal charges in the case, but Baggs said that development did not reflect on the deputies’ actions.

“The district attorney’s decision to file charges is independent of the deputy’s probable cause related to the arrest,” Baggs wrote.

The lawsuit, filed by Keeler’s widow, Raychel, claims sheriff’s deputies were executing an arrest warrant for Michael’s brother when they wrongly arrested him.

Officials also have refused to release to the family any reports or body-worn camera footage related to the encounter between Keeler and deputies, the suit asserts.

It names as defendants Sheriff Bill Gore, San Diego County, the Sheriff’s Department and four deputies — Evan McCormick, Brandon Delima, Katherine Barajas and a Deputy Rose, whose first name was not included.

The 11-page federal complaint accuses the department of excessive force, failure to intervene, false arrest, battery, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The legal complaint also cites independent analyses that show the San Diego Sheriff’s Department’s record when it comes to using excessive force against minorities.

Specifically, the lawsuit refers to a 2020 study from the American Civil Liberties Union that found that for every 1,000 arrests, the department employed excessive force 217 times against Blacks and 110 times against Whites.

The complaint also cited a Los Angeles Times report last year that showed San Diego sheriff’s deputies led the state in causing serious injuries through the use of carotid restraints between 2016 and 2018.

The Keeler lawsuit also recounts prior excessive-force allegations against the Sheriff’s Department, including two cases in which deputies used a chokehold to subdue suspects.

It also notes that defendants Delima and McCormick previously were named in a 2019 lawsuit against the county.

“Defendant Delima was accused of using excessive force when he used his Taser six times against a non-resisting individual while defendant McCormick was accused of excessive force when he unreasonably applied a chokehold to the non-resisting civilian,” the Keeler suit states.

“The poor victim died the next day at the hospital,” it adds.

That case, filed by Dolores Rosales on behalf of her late son Marco Napoles, is pending in federal court in San Diego.

Keeler died in June 2020 from causes that were not identified in the lawsuit.

The Sheriff’s Department said deputies at the time responded to a Fallbrook Fire Department call for service for a man who was not breathing. The patient turned out to be Keeler.

“This death was not related to the arrest in February,” Baggs wrote in her statement. “There were no violations of law or policy by department members related to Mr. Keeler.”

The Union-Tribune reported in May 2020 that San Diego County was the defendant in at least 15 excessive force lawsuits filed in the prior year.

In the first five months of last year, the county paid $1.8 million to inmates injured in custody, people claiming to be arrested without valid reason and others who said they suffered damages at the hands of sheriff’s deputies.

 

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By Zoe Buchli

BY JOLINE GUTIERREZ KRUEGER

What must it be like when anger turns to rage, then to violence.

But not with a slap, a punch, a push, a kick. Not with fists or knives or a gun, but with hands firmly around the neck, squeezing tighter and tighter.

You struggle to breathe, to stay alert, to stay alive.

Panic shoots through you, paralyzes you. You cannot scream. Blood flow through your carotid arteries slows, ceases. With no oxygen reaching your brain, you black out quickly – in about 6.8 seconds.

Death can occur within 62 to 152 seconds.

There may be no outward signs of the damage he has done. If you don’t die then, you worry no one will believe it was as bad as it was. You may not believe it yourself.

But it is that bad.

If you don’t die then, you are 750% more likely to be killed later by your abuser. If he has access to firearms, then 1,100% more likely.

Gail Starr ticks off the shocking statistics as she sounds the alarm about strangulation and its implications. All domestic violence is bad, and as a nurse with Albuquerque Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, or SANE, Starr has seen plenty of that.

Strangulation ratchets up the risk level significantly. Yet it doesn’t receive the public attention it should.

“It needs to be known by everyone that strangulation is a serious thing that should not be blown off,” said Starr, who is also clinical coordinator at SANE in Downtown Albuquerque. “It’s a huge red flag. It’s a strangler telling you, ‘I can kill you and I will kill you.’”

Stalking is also a red flag, she added.

I met Starr recently on my tour of the Family Advocacy Center, a one-stop location for agencies, including SANE, dedicated to aiding victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Two days before my visit, news had broken that the death of Gabby Petito, a young Florida woman whose fatal cross-country trip with her fiancé became a national obsession, was ruled a homicide by strangulation.

The high-profile tragedy generated public discourse on domestic violence, and Starr said she hopes it can now be a catalyst for talking about strangulation and its deadly implications.

She is convinced that if law enforcement, the courts, advocates, medical personnel and survivors see strangulation as a key risk factor for homicide – including mass shootings, child abuse resulting in death and police killings – lives might be saved.

“It could help how we identify cases with the potential to become lethal and how we handle them,” she said.

More than one in four women who identified themselves as being in abusive relationships said they had experienced non-fatal strangulation, according to a study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Starr’s own statistical analysis of the domestic violence patients she sees puts that number locally much higher at 44%.

Yet it wasn’t until 2018 that New Mexico classified strangulation as a serious violent crime. Before then, a defendant who strangled another could be charged with a felony if charged at all, but that charge could and often was reduced to a misdemeanor if a jury was not convinced that the person’s hands can be deadly weapons or that strangling causes real harm.

New Mexico was the 46th state to make strangulation a felony offense. Ohio remains the only state where strangulation is a misdemeanor. In South Carolina, strangulation is part of other felony offenses but is not a stand-alone felony.

Strangulation gets short shrift in part because it does not always produce visible signs of assault and can be hard to prove, Starr said.

“When I do trainings, I talk about how the stereotypes of scratches and bruises aren’t always the case and that only about a third of the cases show any external injury at all,” she said.

With no obvious signs of trauma, police, jurors and the victims themselves can miss the significance of strangulation. That, she said, can lead to deadly consequences.

Compression of the carotid arteries, the major vessels that supply blood and oxygen to the brain, can create potentially lethal blood clots. The trachea can be torn. Both can kill hours or even days after the strangulation.

Even more deadly is strangulation as a significant predictor of future lethal violence.

“The most dangerous domestic violence offenders strangle their victims. The most violent rapists strangle their victims. We used to think all abusers were equal. They are not,” said Casey Gwinn, president of Alliance for HOPE International and co-founder of Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, from which many of the statistics Starr refers to derive. “So when you hear ‘He choked me,’ now we know you are on the edge of a homicide.”

Perhaps the most crucial people to educate about strangulation are the victims themselves.

“I had a patient who told me she couldn’t tell police about her abuser because he would kill her,” Starr said. “And I told her, ‘Honey, you’re going to be killed even if you don’t report him.’”

What must it be like when anger turns to rage, then to violence, his hands firmly around the neck. You look into his eyes, the person you used to love, maybe still love, and what you see scares you. Your eyes show your fear, your terror, and you know he sees that, wants that.

And you know, you have to know now, that the next thing you need to look at is your way out.

UpFront is a front-page news and opinion column. Reach Joline at 730-2793, jkrueger@abqjournal.com, Facebook or @jolinegkg on Twitter.

 

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By VIRGINIA BRIDGES

 

Todra Thornton had finally relented to letting her best friend and her boyfriend stay at her house. “Come on, man, let me and Rico stay,” Erika Desiree Downey had pleaded in September 2016, Thornton said. “I was like, all right.” Thornton picked up the couple, Downey and Larico Fonyte Dunn, and brought them to her apartment. There, she stayed in her room, but heard them fighting when she went to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal.

Donna Chavis explains the Principles of Environmental Justice “I was like, ‘Girl, y’all crazy,’” she said and walked back to her room, Thornton told The News & Observer. About 10 minutes later, Thornton heard “Pop! Pop!”

“I just slung the door open, and I was like ‘What the hell?’” Thornton said. Downey was coming down the hallway, almost falling forward as Dunn followed, shooting, Thornton said. One bullet grazed Thornton’s cheek. Another hit her in the buttocks. Dunn shot Downey in the back and then stood over her and shot her in the face, a prosecutor said in court this week. After Dunn ran out, Thornton called 911 and applied pressure to her friend’s wounds as she died in Thornton’s arms. “She was my only friend,” Thornton said. “I had her back, and she had mine.”

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by: Michele DeSelms

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — October is domestic violence awareness month, and the YWCA is focused on increasing awareness about what they say is the most deadly form of domestic violence: strangulation.

The YWCA reports it is the strongest predictor of domestic homicide. But strangulation is often minimized by the perpetrator, by the victim and by the law. Until 2013 it was only a misdemeanor charge in Michigan.

YWCA Nurse Examiner Program Director Stephanie Solis says screening for strangulation is critical, because many victims don’t report it. She asks questions about symptoms of strangulation, including hoarse voice, sore neck and trouble swallowing.

There is a misconception that there will be obvious signs of injury, but 85% of strangulation cases have no marks or signs of violence.

It takes very little pressure to render someone unconscious.

Anyone looking for help can reach out to the YWCA helpline at 616.454.9922.

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