No charges in death of man who told cops he couldn’t breathe
May 31, 2015, 4:36 PM
SCOTT, La. (AP) — A grand jury has declined to indict Louisiana police officers who held a man down, with officers at on top of him, while he said, “I can’t breathe.”
The Advertiser (http://bit.ly/1eK1DxA ) also quotes the FBI as saying it did not find anything the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Unit could prosecute.
Thirty-year-old Robert Minjarez Jr. was declared dead five days after his arrest by Carencro and Scott police and Lafayette Parish sheriff’s deputies in March 2014.
The coroner’s report says the main cause of death was “compressional asphyxia due to face-down physical restraint by law enforcement officers.”
The report says several officers remained wholly or partly on top of Minjarez after his hands and legs were cuffed, and he repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.
The grand jury met Wednesday.
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