We’ve said it time and time and time again, police officers and emergency responders are either morally ill-equipped to help people in crisis or so poorly trained that they are more of a liability than an asset. BOSSIP has reported on countless instances where a call for help ends with the person in need dead. At a certain point, it becomes extremely difficult to give these sworn officers and medical personnel the benefit of the doubt.
26-year-old Rhyker Earl is the latest unfortunate victim of this gross malpractice. CNN reports that the father of two died after being injected with sedatives when his family called 911 for help when he suffered multiple seizures at their Demotte, Indiana home. On September 8, Earl’s grandmother called Jasper County Sheriff for assistance and when they arrived alongside Keener Township EMTs, they handcuffed him and pinned him to the ground for over 20 minutes as he struggled to get free.
Body camera footage of the incident was released to the public showing Earl’s family trying to get him to calm down.
However, the family says that there are significant parts missing from the edited Sheriff’s office video according to WGNTV.
“I want to see the full footage,” Rhyker Earl’s aunt, Miracle Gawlinski, said during a late Monday morning press conference. “As a witness to this tragic night, I know there’s more footage out there somewhere. There is footage of me screaming, pleading, ‘he’s blue, take his pulse,’ screaming so loud that people outside heard it.”
Ubiquitous civil rights attorney Ben Crump is representing the family and spoke to law enforcement’s ineptitude when it comes to these types of emergencies.
“His family believes that this tragedy was caused by a failure of duty, a lack of training, and a lack of compassion,” Crump said. “We’ve got to make sure that law enforcement knows how to interact with people having medical crises.”
It has come to a point where something is going to have to be done on a federal level because people are going to keep dying at the hands of police who only know one way to deal with these issues.
