Autopsy shows black man murdered by strangulation under police custody

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: The Guardian
5 Dec 2022 15:42
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Broward County Sheriff's office handcuffed, beat, punched, restrained, tasered, pepper sprayed, and eventually strangled Kevin Desir to death.

Kevin Desir's mother (The Guardian)

A newly released autopsy report reveals that a 43-year-old father-of-two Florida man's cause of death was a homicide by strangulation, a case that will once again expose the racist violence and police brutality that characterizes American society.

Kevin Desir became unresponsive on January 17, 2021, after a fight with six deputies at the North Broward Bureau facility, a jail in the south of Florida operated by the Broward County Sheriff's office (BSO) and designed to manage mentally ill jail inmates.

He was arrested for marijuana possession.

Kevin Desir deserves justice. @browardsheriff we are not letting up. See ya in court👊🏿 pic.twitter.com/mnu4MRgBAH
— ChainlessChange (@ChainlessChange) September 18, 2022

Broward County Sheriff's office handcuffed, beat, punched, restrained, tasered, pepper sprayed, and eventually strangled him to death.

Ten days later, Kevin passed away in the hospital due to massive brain injuries sustained in the beating.

The six deputies claimed they were all trying to strap Kevin to a restraint chair.

An initial autopsy conducted by the Broward county medical examiner’s office on January 28, 2021, said that Desir's cause and manner of death were undetermined.

Another autopsy, which was conducted on January 31, 2021, by Dr. Daniel Schultz of Hillsborough county, who was hired by the family of the deceased, found that the cause of death was precisely strangulation.

We are asking for support in our fight to get Justice for Kevin Desir.

Please join us this Tomorrow , February 4, at 11:00 am at the main Broward County Courthouse for a Press Conference.

The address is 201 SE 6th St., Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 33301.#justiceforkevindesir pic.twitter.com/0GsqfZ2tS9
— Mark Nicolas™ (@markonicolas) February 4, 2021

The report stated that Desir died from “manual strangulation” and that his death was the result of homicide after “neck and carotid arteries [were] compressed” during a “law enforcement restraint attempt."

"A completely healthy individual under no prerequisite stress could succumb to that," the report concluded.

Before the private autopsy report was issued, the state attorney's office said it was declining to prosecute the six deputies connected to Desir's death.

Desir's family has been fighting to bring justice to their late loved one.

They are also asking for videos of Kevin's murder to be released to the public.

"They [need] to release the tapes, so I can see how they killed my son," said Kevin’s mother, 73-year-old Sercilia Desir, as quoted by The Guardian.

Black people are nearly three times more likely to be killed at the hands of the police than white people in the United States.

Making up 12.8% of the population, black people, through data collected between 2013-2022, endured 61 killings per one million people in the United States, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

As the murder and systemic injustices toward black people continue to be carried out on a daily basis in the US, the White House is pursuing efforts to wreak havoc across the global south, including Iran where it seeks to implement regime change.

It seeks to do so by instrumenting the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died under natural conditions while under police custody, but her death provided the US with a window of opportunity to trigger nationwide riots.