Authorities in the U.S. state of Washington announced Thursday that they have charged three police officers with the March 2020 death of an African-American man who, like George Floyd about two and a half months later, begged them not to “put pressure on his body.” he could breathe. “
Christopher Burbank and Matthew Collins, police officers in Tacoma, a city about 50 miles from Seattle, are on trial for manslaughter, while their colleague Timothy Rankin was charged with manslaughter, the U.S. Attorney General’s Office said in a statement. Bob Ferguson.
Arrest warrants have been issued against the three men, who are facing life sentences, said the Democratic Attorney General who has been assigned the case.
On March 3, Messrs. Burbank and Collins went to arrest Manuel Ellis, a 33-year-old African-American man who was returning home after buying donuts from a grocery store. They said that the man in his thirties attacked them. But video and eyewitnesses questioned the version of events they presented, according to the prosecutor’s office.
The two ex-soldiers forced Ellis to “fall to the ground”, “hit him repeatedly”, applied a “choke grip” to the man and struck him “three times with a teaser”, a weapon that causes electroshock, “without excuse”. states the announcement of the prosecution.
The third, Officer Rankin, who arrived later, along with other reinforcements, “held” Ellis face down “and continued to apply pressure” with his knee “on his back even though he said he could not breathe”, the text continues.
The scene was filmed by a security camera and passers-by. In one of the videos, Ellis is heard begging with his hands tied behind his back, “I can’t breathe, sir.” At no point does he seem to have resisted.
The death of George Floyd on May 25 of the same year below the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis drew attention to this case. Manuel Ellis’s name was heard in the summer of 2020 at major demonstrations in the United States in protest of police brutality.
Against this background, the governor of the state of Washington, Jay Insley, acquitted the sheriff and the local prosecutor from the investigation into Ellis’s death, talking about a “conflict of interest”. On Thursday, he “thanked” Bob Ferguson for “conducting an in-depth investigation”, judging that this “is the first step towards justice” in a press release he published.
Prosecution of police officers is very rare in the United States; convictions even more so.
In April, however, a jury found police officer Derek Sauvin guilty of killing George Floyd. Two other former police officers have been charged with murder since the verdict, and another was convicted by a jury in Alabama of killing a suicidal man.
