- Orignally published by the Virginia Pilot on August 31, 2004 [here
]
By MATTHEW ROY, The Virginian-Pilot
NORFOLK -- It was shot through a rain-splattered police windshield: a videotape that captured some of the final moments of Kenny S. Jefferson , who died Aug. 14 after struggling with police on Chesapeake Boulevard .On Monday, city officials allowed a Virginian-Pilot reporter and an NAACP leader to watch about 15 minutes of the videotape in the city attorney's office, with ranking police present, including Chief Bruce P. Marquis .
City Attorney Bernard Pishko said the tape shows that police acted appropriately while doing a tough job: responding in the rain, getting exposed to Jefferson's blood from wounds he incurred punching car windows, keeping their tempers, staying attentive to him after he was subdued and ultimately attempting to save his life.
John Wesley Hill , president of the city's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a former police officer, said he did not see any inappropriate action on the tape.
But Hill said he has questions about what the tape didn't show -- the use of pepper spray on Jefferson before the arrival of the supervisor.
Hill questioned if the spray could sometimes aggravate situations rather than make them better. The NAACP has asked the city for information about pepper spray, including how often it has been used and its possible effects, and Hill contended that Norfolk's leaders should be concerned about its use .
Capt. Michael Young said officers fired two quick bursts of pepper spray at Jefferson, with little apparent effect.
Marquis weighed in on pepper spray, calling it "about as safe a non lethal that you can use on someone."
Police involved in the incident had been temporarily placed on administrative duties. But they returned to their usual work a little more than a week ago after Commonwealth's Attorney John R. Doyle III said in a letter to Marquis that the videotape and witness statements showed they "only used the degree of force necessary to restrain Mr. Jefferson."
The video was shot from the car of a supervisor who arrived as several officers struggled to handcuff Jefferson, who lay face down on the wet road . Some of the action was obscured by officers grouped around him, their backs to the camera.
Officers cuffed his hands behind his back, then cuffed his ankles together and bound his ankles to his wrists.
A short while later -- Young said it was just more than a minute -- Jefferson was moved to his side, then his back. At some point, an officer felt for a pulse, and appeared to monitor him for a bit.
Eventually, police attempted to revive Jefferson with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Young said.
Jefferson, 26 , who police and witnesses say had punched out windows of passing vehicles and behaved bizarrely that day, was pronounced dead at a city hospital a short while later.
The state medical examiner's office has yet to release a cause of death pending laboratory tests. Officials have suggested Jefferson was under the influence of some substance .
Pishko made the video available for viewing to a Virginian-Pilot reporter after the newspaper requested to see it under the Freedom of Information Act. However, Pishko said that he had grounds to withhold the videotape under the act because it was part of a confidential administrative investigation and said that making it available for viewing was "discretionary."
He declined to allow the newspaper to take images of the video. "I just don't think that it's the type of thing that should be plastered all over the place," Pishko said.
In an interview later Monday, Melody Vergara of Virginia Beach, who had two children with Jefferson, said he was a good, generous person.
She said he had an anxiety disorder and also been hospitalized recently for a seizure. His actions that day, she said, were "crying for help."
She also questioned the police use of pepper spray in an interview Monday. Her eyes were irritated after she identified his body at a hospital, she said.