Mental crisis in custody spurred ‘death sentence,’ prosecutors say at trial (original) (raw)

Irvo Otieno stopped breathing last year as multiple law enforcement officers and staff members at Virginia’s Central State Hospital restrained him for 11 minutes, in a case that sparked international headlines and drew widespread comparisons to prominent instances of police brutality against Black people.

Now a jury will decide whether Otieno’s death — caught entirely on video — was a crime.

The first trial in the case of Otieno, 28, began Monday in Dinwiddie, Va., after months of unusual moves by prosecutors scaling back what had started as a sprawling murder investigation. Wavie Jones, a former hospital security staffer who helped to restrain Otieno, went on trial on a charge of involuntary manslaughter and faces a maximum prison sentence of 10 years if convicted. Two Henrico County sheriff’s deputies, Brandon Rodgers and Kaiyell Sanders, are set to face the same charge at trials later this year.

His family members say Otieno was having a mental health breakdown and was abused by authorities rather than getting the help he neededon March 6, 2023.Attorneys for Jones have sharply disputed that characterization in court documents and say he was trying to keep Otieno and others safe, setting up a test for the jury of whether Otieno’s erratic conduct in the days leading up to his death justified the prolonged efforts to restrain him once he was in the hospital.

“A mental health crisis should not be a death sentence,” Dinwiddie County Commonwealth’s Attorney Amanda C. Mann said in her opening statement.

Jones’s attorneys, Doug Ramseur and Emilee Hasbrouck, have argued that Otieno had a history of violence and was being profane and combative toward authorities, including the dozen officers who responded to his home in the Richmond suburbs three days before his death, on March 3, 2023, after neighbors called police to complain of Otieno’s “menacing and disturbing” conduct.

In court Monday, Hasbrouck called Otieno’s death a “tragedy” but said it was not caused by Jones and the others, who she said struggled with Otieno only to roll him to a safer position, from facedown on the floor to his side.

The 310-pound Otieno, with an enlarged heart and history of hypertension, did not die from a smothering scrum, Hasbrouck asserted, but from “a sudden cardiac event” brought on “as he fought the people who tried to help him.”

“Wavie Jones acted to help, not to hurt, because that’s who he is — he’s a helper,” she said.

Jurors saw close-up photos of Otieno’s wrists and hands, bearing deep indentations from the shackles he wore throughout the struggle. But they were not shown a close-up of his face after Ramseur successfully argued that the image would be “more prejudicial than probative.”

Otieno’s mother, Caroline Ouko, sobbed quietly in the courtroom as the photos were projected on two large TV screens, then suddenly shot her left hand in the air, as if to ask a question. The proceedings went on uninterrupted, and a sheriff’s deputy in the back of the room quietly directed her to put her hand down.

Out in the hallway later, Ouko asked the prosecutor about the excluded photo, saying between loud sobs that it “showed his head swollen like a melon, with bruises. That picture needs to be shown.”

Personal injury attorney Ben Crump, who sat with Ouko along with family and friends, said Ouko felt the image would have shown “there’s a person, not a body” involved.

Much of the Otieno case fell apart before reaching the jury in Dinwiddie Circuit Court, as prosecutors backtracked on charges. The Dinwiddie commonwealth’s attorney initially obtained an indictment charging 10 defendants with second-degree murder. But seven of those defendants got their charges dropped, and Jones, Rodgers and Sanders saw their charges downgraded to involuntary manslaughter.

The medical examiner ruled Otieno’s death a homicide by “positional and mechanical asphyxia with restraints.” Central State surveillance footage shows his final moments amid a group of deputies and hospital staff, from the time Henrico County sheriff’s deputies drag him into a hospital admissions room in handcuffs and leg irons, to the 11 minutes in which they restrain Otieno on the floor, to the moment when they release his limp body, as well as unsuccessful resuscitation efforts.

After Otieno’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) pushed for a multimillion-dollar legal settlement in September 2023 to “alleviate — in a small way — some of the suffering that Irvo’s mother and brother faced,” according to a spokeswoman for the governor. Otieno’s family and their civil rights attorneys received $8.5 million total from Virginia, Henrico County and the county sheriff’s office, according to court records.

Officers who encountered Otieno on March 3, 2023, at first took him to Parham Doctors’ Hospital for a mental health evaluation. But he became unruly there, and he was booked in the Henrico County Jail, authorities said. Three days later, after an altercation with jail deputies, Otieno was taken to Central State Hospital for mental health treatment when he was restrained.

Ann Cabell Baskervill, the Dinwiddie commonwealth’s attorney who started the case, at first charged seven sheriff’s deputies and three hospital staff members with second-degree murder. She dropped all charges against two of the hospital workers shortly before stepping down last year, saying she had changed her mind after reviewing the hospital video and hearing the defendants’ side of the story.

The sitting Dinwiddie commonwealth’s attorney conducted her own review of the evidence, then dropped the cases against five others and downgraded the remaining three defendants’ charges to involuntary manslaughter. Second-degree murder is punishable by up to 40 years in prison; the manslaughter charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.

Mann, who took over this year as the county’s top prosecutor, said in court filings that she decided to drop charges against five of the sheriff’s deputies because she was unable to change her office’s trial strategy by the time she took over the investigation.

An interim prosecutor who filled in after Baskervill’s departure decided the order in which defendants would stand trial. Mann disagreed with that sequence, and a judge denied an earlier request she had made to reshuffle the order, she wrote. “The order in which the defendants are tried is of strategic importance,” Mann wrote. She has declined to make public comments about the case.