Carlos Ingram Lopez will begin by apologizing, before groaning and calling his grandmother for help, saying “I can’t breathe anymore”. Twelve minutes later, he was unconscious, “a victim of cardiac arrest,” according to Tucson police chief Chris Magnus, who resigned Wednesday night.
AFP
Carlos Ingram Lopez, 27, died in Tucson. Victim of a cardiac arrest during his arrest.
The Tucson, Arizona chief of police resigned after the death of a young man who was tackled to the ground for 12 minutes by three officers, under circumstances that are under investigation.
Carlos Ingram Lopez, 27, died on April 21 in this city in the southwest of the United States. The police responded to an emergency call at his grandmother’s home where the young man of Latin American origin was naked and very agitated.
The video released by local authorities on Wednesday shows the three men, two white police officers and a black policeman, chasing the unarmed victim into the garage of the house where they handcuffed him before placing him on the ground, facing against the ground.
I can not breath anymore
The young man will begin by apologizing, before moaning, calling his grandmother for help, saying “I can’t breathe anymore”. Twelve minutes later, he was unconscious, “a victim of cardiac arrest,” according to Tucson police chief Chris Magnus, who resigned Wednesday night.
It is up to the municipal authorities to accept it or not, but the mayor of Tucson, Regina Romero, said in a statement to AFP that the chief should not resign. Even if the death of Carlos Ingram Lopez precedes that of George Floyd by more than a month, the video in which he complains of suffocation inevitably echoes the death of the black forties under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
For Chief Magnus, if his men did not act in accordance with the practices in force in his service, there was no intention to harm. “He was not hit, he was not wrenched in the neck or throttled,” he said.
According to him, the autopsy of the victim revealed a high dose of cocaine in his body and an abnormal size of the heart, but could not precisely determine the cause of death. “It is irresponsible and unfair to say that he was killed by the police,” said Chris Magnus.
The prosecutor’s office is still investigating the death, but has not brought any charges against the three police officers, who have resigned.
In neighboring Colorado, Governor Jared Polis has asked to reopen investigations into the death of 23-year-old black man Elijah McClain in August 2019 in Aurora. The victim died of a heart attack after being arrested by police officers who had wrenched his neck and forcibly injected him with a powerful sedative.
A police officer claimed that McClain, who was carrying no weapons, attempted to seize his revolver. The case had not given rise to any prosecution and a petition launched to reopen the investigation collected Thursday more than three million signatures.
USA: House adopts police reform bill, Senate deadlock
Exactly a month after the death of George Floyd, who sparked a historic anti-racism protest in the United States, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives adopted plans for a major police reform on Thursday.
Named after this black man, killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, this text is, however, as it stands, doomed to failure in the Republican majority Senate. And despite the will shown by the two parties to achieve reform, their positions are currently so far apart that a quick agreement seems difficult to achieve before the parliamentary recess on July 3.
“Exactly a month ago, George Floyd said his last words,” I cannot breathe, “and changed the course of our nation’s history,” Democratic House Speaker Nancy said in the hemicycle. Pelosi, before the vote.
By adopting this text, the lower house “gives honor to his life and to the lives of all those killed by police brutality, by saying + never again this, + and by acting,” she added. With applause, the text was adopted by 236 votes to 181. Three Republicans supported it.
Among the major points of contention with the Republicans, the text provides in particular for an outright ban on strangulation and attacks the broad immunity enjoyed by American police.
It also provides for the end of search warrants for narcotics-related offenses that allow officers to enter the suspects without knocking. It was during such an intervention that Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black nurse, was killed at home in March by police bullets.
Democrats on Wednesday blocked a Republican police reform bill in the Senate, saying it did not go far enough.
Its author, Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, and Donald Trump accuse the opposition of not wanting to reach a consensus before the crucial presidential and parliamentary elections on November 3.
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