It should have been obvious to the Warren police officers in Michigan that Christopher Gibson was suffering a mental health crisis when they detained him three years ago.
After all, the mother of the then-24-year-old Black man who contacted police for help repeatedly told officers that her son had schizophrenia and needed to be transported to a mental health facility.
Even people at a gas station that Gibson had run off to called the police, telling them they were concerned for his safety. His mother said his mental episode had been triggered by a close cousin dying of cancer, whom he had spent the prior evening with.
But Warren police transported him to jail instead after discovering he had warrants for identity theft.
And once he was placed inside a jail cell, Warren police ended up pepper-spraying, tasering, and beating him because he would not comply with their orders to allow himself to be handcuffed in order to be taken to another jail.
On Aug. 13, the ACLU of Michigan filed a lawsuit against the city of Warren, along with several of the Warren police officers who abused him, accusing them of excessive force, failing to provide medical care, and failing to abide by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“If officers regarded Mr. Gibson’s behavior as problematic, the antidote was not violence,” said Mark P. Fancher in a press release, staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan’s Racial Justice Project.
“He required compassion and treatment while in the throes of a mental health crisis, which would have made pepper spray, handcuffs, a taser, and brutalization unnecessary. This case makes clear, yet again, why Warren and other police agencies need to have mental health professionals to respond to – and prevent – horrific incidents such as this.”
Watch the video below.
‘You Picked the Wrong City’
The incident took place on Dec. 12, 2022, after Gibson visited his mother “after an emotional night spent with a cousin dying of cancer,” the claim states.
“Plaintiff has a mental disability, and he began to display symptoms that included: incoherence, manic behavior that included following family members, repetitive rambling, talking to himself, and sitting in a catatonic state.”
Once detained and placed in the back of a patrol car, Gibson tried to explain to the officer he was going through severe stress, telling him, “I was worried about my f_cking family. I was literally going through it …”
“You picked the wrong city to be going through in it,” the cop responded.
Gibson was inside a jail cell at the police department when the cops told him they needed to handcuff him to transport him to the Macomb County Jail.
Gibson was reluctant to allow himself to be handcuffed through a slot in the jail cell door, telling the cops he was having issues because of his mental illness.
“I’m mental, bro,” he said. “My mental ….”
But a Warren police officer cut him off by saying, “You’re mental, that’s fine. You can still follow directions.”
But Fancher, the ACLU attorney, said he was not in the right frame of mind to follow directions and that should have been obvious to the cops.
“The man was undergoing extreme trauma,” Fancher said in a video posted to YouTube on Aug. 13 by the ACLU of Michigan.
“He was already having a mental health episode, a crisis. And now he had been placed in this cell where he was uncertain of his fate.”
Fancher explained that the cops entered his cell to subdue him, triggering a reaction from him where he bit one of the officers.
“As this point as far as they were concerned, he was somebody who had committed assault against an officer. And from then on, he was treated as someone who was a danger to police officers whether they really believed it or not.”
“They went with a full battalion of officers who were ready for war,” Fancher said.
That led to multiple cops planting their body weight on him while telling him to lie down, one cop forcing his face into the floor, and another cop tasering him.
“They’re killing me, literally,” Gibson cried out while being abused. “My f_cking mental illness is going on, what the f_ck,” Gibson continued to plead.
‘I Thought They Murdered My Son’
Body camera video shows the cops continued to abuse him on the way to the Macomb County Jail, including one cop taking him out of the back seat of the patrol car while handcuffed and body slamming him on the asphalt. The cops left him with injuries so bad that they had to transport him to a hospital instead of jail.
Meanwhile, Gibson’s mother, Alwanda Gibson, said police were providing no information on the whereabouts of her son.
“I called all day long for three days straight, hour after hour, and they kept telling me they did not have my son in their custody,” she explained in the ACLU video.
When she finally learned of his whereabouts and showed up at the hospital, the police did not allow her to visit him in the hospital room.
“Ms. Gibson was asked by the people at the hospital whether he had a history of problems with his kidneys or his heart because they had been extremely damaged, that there was internal bleeding,” Fancher said.
“The condition that he was diagnosed with among other things was rhabdomyolysis which is a condition that results from extreme pressure on the body.”
“The video shows multiple officers applying their full body weight to him and causing these extreme injuries.”
According to the lawsuit, that is normally how Warren police deal with mentally ill people they detain.
This was not an isolated occurrence. The Warren Police Department has a history of physically and otherwise abusing persons they have arrested. These incidents include, among others: a) In 2023 an argument between a Warren police officer and an arrestee who was being fingerprinted and photographed escalated and the officer struck the arrestee multiple times and then slammed his head against the floor ; b) It was reported that in 2022 six Warren police officers repeatedly punched and kicked a 17-year-old; c) It was reported that in 2021 four Warren police officers participated in the beating of a 16-year-old who was accused of stealing a catalytic converter. The youth was rendered unconscious by the beating.
The Warren police officers listed as defendants in the lawsuit are Steven Hodges, Brenden Fraser, Daniel Bradley, Jeffrey Motyka, Mark Smith, Thomas Schmelzer, Anthony Giannola, Adam Dickie, David Villerot, James Rebidas, David Huffman and a cop with the surname Harmon whose first name is unknown, along with five John Doe officers.
The abusive and vicious treatment by these cops left Gibson with severe post-traumatic stress syndrome, said his mother.
“Christopher is afraid to sit on the porch,” Alwanda Gibson said in the ACLU video. “He’s afraid to see the police officers when they ride down the street. He thinks they’re going to jump out and finish the job of what the Warren Police Department did to him.”
“Had they just listened and handled the situation better, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
Christopher Gibson also spoke in the ACLU video, saying, “I actually feel lucky to still be alive after what they did to me.”
“So now I’m just speaking with the hope that telling my story will prevent any other people with mental illnesses like I have myself from ever really experiencing that again, that kind of cruelty and abuse,” he said.
“Please help me make that happen.”
Great Job Carlos Miller & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star Source link for sharing this story.
