Charges Dropped Against Falsely Accused Black Man - 3 Nights in Jail. From [HERE] Keenan Ellsberry said the last thing he expected when he drove to his ex-wife's house in the wee hours of May 2, 2011, was to be mistaken for a drug dealer and beaten by police.
"I thought I was going to die," the 36-year-old advertising executive from West Bloomfield said of the events that morning in Detroit. Ellsberry, who is black, said two white officers savagely attacked him in front of his ex-wife and two of his children and then falsely accused him of assaulting the officers and trying to grab one of their guns. The criminal charges were dropped after Officer Steve Posey, who also is black, told internal affairs investigators that the other officers used excessive force.
Ellsberry says he suffered long-term injuries and is suing the officers and the city. His ex-wife, Chanel Smith, a vice president of a suburban bank branch, filed a separate suit on behalf of their children, saying they are getting therapy for trauma.
The incident began about 3 a.m., according to police reports, dispatch recordings and internal affairs interviews obtained by Ellsberry's lawyers. Officers Brian Terechenok and Justin Lyons, both 12-year department veterans, said Ellsberry failed to signal a turn in Detroit's quiet, middle-class Rosedale Park neighborhood.
Ellsberry, vice president and director of innovation at Team Detroit, Ford's Dearborn-based advertising agency, said he was on his way to his ex-wife's home to drop off some of the $1,880 in cash he had received from selling a motorcycle. The officers said Ellsberry sped off in his 2006 white Land Rover and blew through stop and yield signs before pulling into his ex-wife's driveway in the 15300 block of Stahelin.
Ellsberry said there was no chase. He said he pulled over after noticing the scout car's emergency lights.
He said officers ordered him out of his vehicle and assaulted him without warning outside the view of the scout car camera. The officers said the 6-foot-2, 175-pound Ellsberry hit them and tried to grab Lyons' gun before they finally subued him.
Afterward, he was taken to a hospital for treatment, and then booked for fleeing and eluding police, resisting arrest, assault and trying to disarm an officer. He spent three days in jail.
What officer reported
Ellsberry's criminal lawyer, Harrison Munson of Detroit, said Ellsberry's fate would have been sealed but for Posey, 44, a former Chrysler worker who joined the department in 2009.
It was Posey's first night on midnights in the 8th Precinct.
He and Officer James Aude, who is white, were the first to respond to Terechenok and Lyons' call for help.
When they arrived, Posey said, he saw Ellsberry's distraught ex-wife and their crying 12-year-old daughter in the driveway. After ordering them into the house, he saw Ellsberry lying face-down on the front lawn with his hands cuffed behind his back.
He said Lyons was on top of Ellsberry, kneeing him in the kidneys and screaming at him to stop resisting.
Ellsberry wasn't resisting, Posey later told investigators.
He said Terechenok was standing nearby and out of breath, as if he had been involved in the struggle.
Posey said he tapped Lyons on the shoulder to stop him from kneeing Ellsberry and tried to get Ellsberry to his feet.
By then, two other white officers arrived, William Zeolla and Jason Kile.
Posey told investigators that he yelled at Kile to avoid stepping on Ellsberry's cell phone. He said Kile deliberately kicked it across the lawn. Then, Zeolla stepped with full force on the side of Ellsberry's face, Posey said.
Chanel Smith told investigators she was on the phone with Ellsberry when he pulled into her driveway, heard him repeatedly ask what he had done wrong and then heard a commotion.
When she went outside, she said, she saw two officers on top of Ellsberry, punching, kneeing and choking him.
"Why are they doing that to Dad?" she said her children, ages 10 and 12, screamed.
More scout cars arrived.
Smith said she pleaded with the officers to stop the beating.
Ellsberry never resisted, she said. "I felt like his life was slipping away ..."
Eventually, Posey got Ellsberry into his scout car.
"Man, I wasn't fighting them, I wasn't fighting them," Posey said Ellsberry told him.
While Ellsberry was at a hospital getting stitches in his upper lip and painkillers for bruises, officers searched his vehicle for drugs or weapons. They found an empty magazine for Ellsberry's legally registered handgun.
At one point, they wanted to take the vehicle to the Ambassador Bridge to have border agents X-ray it for contraband.
Officers got a warrant to draw blood to check for alcohol or drugs in Ellsberry's system. The results were negative.
Later that morning, he was taken back to the hospital because he was urinating blood.
By then, Posey had told a supervisor, Sgt. James Demps, what he had witnessed.
Demps, who is black, had arrived at the scene after the struggle, but told investigators he had to physically stop Terechenok from manhandling Ellsberry during a pat down.
Demps also said he had "a bad vibe" about the incident because Ellsberry didn't have the demeanor of a dope dealer and trying to stop him at 3 a.m. for a minor traffic offense seemed contrived. He also said he suspected Terechenok of being racist.
Demps wouldn't discuss the case with the Free Press.
But audiotapes of his interview with investigators show that he wanted his shift lieutenant to call Internal Affairs. He said the lieutenant didn't want to jeopardize the officers' careers.
"What if this is your brother, your cousin or whatever," Demps said he told his boss. "Wouldn't you want some justice for this guy? I mean, think about this. This happened in front of his wife and kids. They'll never look at him the same. ... Something's got to be done."
Demps said a sergeant who also was reluctant to call Internal Affairs expressed shock after googling Ellsberry's name and discovering what he does for a living.
Internal affairs got involved anyway after Ellsberry complained that $450 of his cash was missing. The investigation quickly escalated into a police brutality probe.
"None of this surprises me -- we see it every day," Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality said of the Ellsberry case.
Scott's group has complained for years about police brutality in Detroit. Its efforts helped spark an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, which forced the Police Department in 2003 to adopt policies to reduce use of force, curtail mistreatment of prisoners and end the practice of dragnet arrests of potential homicide witnesses.
The department is years behind schedule in carrying out the reforms. But under Mayor Dave Bing, the department has made an all-out push to comply and is nearing the 90% mark.
Though use-of-force complaints have dropped -- there were 1,369 complaints in 2011 and 1,421 in 2010 -- critics say the department still has a costly brutality problem.
Nearly half of the $57.4 million the cash-strapped city has paid out in lawsuits since July 2009 was in police cases, many involving excessive force and false arrest, records show.
"We're making headway because people aren't being killed," Scott said. "But the beatings, the verbal abuse and the racist remarks have not gone away."
Scott said the Ellsberry case is a good example of that.
Refusing to cover up
"The hero of this story is Steve Posey," said Ellsberry's lawyer, David A. Robinson of Southfield. "Posey saw something wrong and put his career on the line by following policy, not the Blue Code" -- an unwritten policy of police officers covering for each other.
Robinson, a former Detroit police officer, said it's one of the few times he has seen an officer break ranks with comrades.
Posey declined to comment for this report.
The department's internal affairs section presented Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy with a warrant request for criminal charges against three officers. But after several months, the department still is waiting for a response.
Worthy's office said it hopes to decide soon.
The officers, who have been involved in other excessive-force lawsuits that collectively have cost the city $660,000 in settlements, didn't respond to a Free Press interview request. The lawsuits alleged unprovoked beatings and trumped-up charges to justify the officers' conduct. It's unclear if they were disciplined in those cases.
City lawyers wouldn't comment on the Ellsberry case, but said in court papers that the officers had probable cause for the arrest and acted in self-defense.
Former Deputy Chief Jamie Fields, who was in charge of consent-decree compliance until he retired in 2009, says the department hasn't gotten the upper hand on excessive force.
He said police supervisors often are reluctant to discipline overly aggressive cops because they make a lot of arrests and produce statistics.
"The majority of officers want to do the right thing," Fields said. "Until you start holding officers accountable and disciplining them for doing wrong things and show that such behavior won't be tolerated, the culture won't change."
At a community meeting Thursday to discuss the city's crime crisis, Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. said that his officers must be aggressive but mindful of the rights of law-abiding citizens in combating crime.
"We have to resist the urge of those heavy-handed techniques that run over people's rights," he said, referring to controversial tactics, such as stop-and-frisk, that tend to target minorities.
Terechenok, Lyons and Zeolla wouldn't talk to investigators on advice of their lawyers.
Two other officers, both white, said they didn't witness an assault on Ellsberry.
"I was in a position to have seen that and I can say with a clear conscience that that did not happen," said Aude, adding that Ellsberry resisted being handcuffed, but not violently.
"I don't know why people's names are getting stomped in the mud on this whole thing," Kile told investigators.
Charges dismissed
Three months later, a judge dismissed the charges against Ellsberry after Terechenok, Lyons and Zeolla refused to testify at Ellsberry's preliminary exam.
Ellsberry said the episode was scary: "If Posey hadn't come onto the scene and my wife and kids hadn't been there, I think they would have killed me."
He said his fingers are still numb from the incident, and he has nerve damage in his wrists because of too-tight handcuffs.
He wants the officers prosecuted and fired.
But that may not happen.
Chief Godbee said that there are discrepancies in Posey's account that could prevent the officers from being charged or disciplined. He wouldn't elaborate.