Lucio Vasquez / Houston Public Media
Seven Harris County Jail employees have been reassigned and are restricted from having contact with inmates after a man died during a struggle that ensued as he was leaving the jail earlier this month, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said.
Security and body camera video footage that was released by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office on Friday shows the moments before 32-year-old Alexis Cardenas was restrained by several detention officers after he refused to exit the jail.
The video footage shows when detention officers escorted Cardenas to the exit door. Cardenas is seen backing away from the door and towards a corner of the room, putting his hands up. He lies on the ground, and one officer begins to drag him towards the exit.
An officer can be seen deploying a taser at Cardenas at close range before several officers attempted to restrain him. He is seen on security video walking back into a secure area of the jail, where additional officers attempt to pin him to the ground. An officer at one point can be seen striking Cardenas’s face with his fist.
At least four officers kneeled while continuing to pin Cardenas to the ground. Twelve other officers at one point entered the room and surrounded Cardenas after he was handcuffed and his face was still held to the floor, the video shows. Five minutes after the sheriff’s office wrote that officers gained control over the man, they noticed he became unresponsive.
Speaking at a press conference on Friday afternoon, Gonzalez could not say whether or not the officers followed protocols during the struggle. An officer administered CPR to Cardenas in the jail before he was transported to St. Joseph Hospital and pronounced dead.
Cardenas was arrested in a southwest Houston parking lot two days before he died by Houston police officers for allegedly failing to appear in court for a decade-old traffic citation.
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Documents provided to Houston Public Media show that a warrant was issued for his arrest on Jan. 12, 2015, after he failed to appear in court for a traffic violation charge. The violation happened when he allegedly failed to yield right of way at an intersection while making a left turn in 2014. That led to an accident with another vehicle, documents show.
An arrest document shows he was arrested by a Houston Police Department officer on three municipal violations on July 6 this year. He claimed good health at the time of the arrest, according to the document.
One day after his arrest, he was ordered to appear in court for not having a valid driver’s license, failing to establish financial responsibility and failing to yield right-of-way. All the violations were over a decade old. The charges were dismissed on July 7 after the officer was not present in court.
He was released from the downtown Houston jail in the early morning hours of July 8, when the altercation between Cardenas and officers began. Gonzalez did not say whether or not he was struggling from a mental health crisis during the altercation or at the time he was first arrested by Houston police. He called Cardenas’s release from jail unique.
“In nine years that I have been sheriff here, I have never had a situation where someone had already exited, or was on the verge of literally exiting when they wanted to come back in for whatever reason,” he said.
During the booking process in the Harris County Jail, a medical screening form is filled out to determine if a person is suffering from mental and physical ailments before they are booked into the jail. The screening form, which covers 38 questions, asks if a person is hearing noises that others don’t seem to hear, or if they are worried that someone might hurt or kill them. Gonzalez said the screening didn’t show any major physical or mental health issues.
At one point during the roughly 30 hours that Cardenas was imprisoned, he made a visit to one of the clinics in the jail. Gonzalez didn’t say why he visited the clinic.
Melissa Cardenas, his cousin, last month said her family was left in the dark about the circumstances surrounding his death. She said he had originally approached a police officer the day he was arrested in fear for his life.
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