Technology

'Backdoor' Search Of FBI Records Helps Parents Learn How Local Cops Killed Their Son

The roundabout way that the FBI and FOIA blew the lid off a police coverup.

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FBI cap hatThis long Austin American-Statesman investigative report details apparent police brutality as discovered by parents who were kept in the dark by local cops about how their teenaged son actually died. It all started with their 5’4″ 110-lb. 18-year-old suffering through a bad acid trip while hanging out with friends. It ended in the hospital with their son brain-dead, on life support, and the arresting agency unwilling to say anything more than their son had suffered a “head injury.”

To the law enforcement agency, it’s just another in-custody death. To the parents of Graham Dyer, it’s long-delayed closure to a chapter kept deliberately unfinished by the law enforcement agencies who took Dyer into custody and returned him to his parents more dead than alive.

In Texas, the system is stacked against victims of police misconduct. State law, upheld by court decisions, make it almost impossible to mount a lawsuit against law enforcement officers. Courts are generally receptive to law enforcement claims and extremely hesitant to strip officers of immunity, no matter how egregious the apparent civil rights violation. This situation is made much, much worse in Texas where documents needed to propel a lawsuit past a judge’s first reading often can’t be obtained from the law enforcement agency holding them.

State law says a police agency isn’t required to turn over records for incidents that don’t result in a conviction. Graham, who’d been charged with assaulting a police officer after the confrontation, had died before his case could be litigated. So, the department reasoned, his records were confidential. Asked to weigh in on the dispute, then-Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed the Mesquite police could refuse the Dyers’ request.

The most important part of this paragraph is two words in the last sentence: “could refuse.” The law does not forbid departments from handing over this information. It simply gives them a legal excuse not to. The Mesquite PD could have closed this tragic chapter in the Dyers’ lives, but doing so would have guaranteed a lawsuit. So, it withheld the records, ensuring the officers involved in Graham Dyer’s death remained free of accountability. It continued to deny release of the record, citing “ongoing investigations” that apparently involved one dead “suspect” and another arrestee, who had only been charged with public intoxication.

Faced with this hurdle, the Dyers approached the FBI, asking it to investigate Graham’s death. It performed an investigation, but informed the couple it could not find enough evidence to move forward with a federal civil rights lawsuit on the couple’s behalf. But it did open a door for the Dyers to obtain the evidence the Mesquite PD wouldn’t release.

Using the federal Freedom of Information Act, in early 2015 Kathy asked the FBI to turn over any records it had accumulated in its investigation of Graham’s death in Mesquite. That fall, police videos of the fatal evening started arriving.

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The recordings are disturbing. Graham’s parents haven’t watched them, on the advice of their lawyer. (All images below a screengrabs from the video posted at the Statesman.)

There was, for example, the image of a Mesquite police officer standing with his foot on Graham’s head.

There was the image of Graham in the backseat of the police cruiser, his hands and feet bound — yet also unseatbelted or otherwise restricted — in obvious distress, hurling himself about the car. And then the ghostly image of a police officer’s hand with a Taser stun gun appearing in the camera frame, shocking Graham on the leg.

And then, pushing him on his back and shocking him again — this time directly, and apparently deliberately, in his testicles. And Graham screaming silently as the electric shock to his genitals appeared to be repeated.

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The Statesman has also released 24 seconds of audio from the arrest. It contains just enough to add even more horror to the images above. It contains the tortured screams from the 18-year-old as he is tased by an officer. It contains another disheartening scream from Dyer, who was suffering through a bad LSD trip at the time of his arrest: “Where the fuck am I?” And, disturbingly, it contains an officer’s brutal statement as he tased the bound teenager: “Motherfucker, I’m going to kill you.”

That officer was correct. The Mesquite PD did kill Graham Dyer. It killed him to save him from himself, according to the PD.

“A Taser was deployed in an effort to control decedent, prevent escape and prevent him from injuring himself,” the city stated in court documents, adding the officer had been aiming for Graham’s leg and it was dark.

The PD also killed Dyer with indifference. By the time Dyer arrived at the jail, he was in terrible shape. But to the five officers on the scene, he was just a piece of inconvenient meat.

The videos of Graham as he was delivered to the jail also seemed at odds with the police department’s explanation of what occurred. According to the agency’s in-custody death report, upon arriving at the jail Graham had still needed to be placed in a special restraint chair “until the jail personnel noticed he was having labored breathing.”

Yet the video the Dyers received from the FBI depicts Graham lying limp on the sally-port floor after being lifted out of the cruiser. As he tries to raise his head, one of the officers pushes it back to the ground.

Records show it would be more than two hours before an ambulance was called.

The Dyers can finally move forward with their lawsuit. The presiding judge says the evidence obtained — no thanks to the Mesquite PD — shows they have a plausible civil rights claim. The PD obviously hoped its public records exemptions would keep the Dyers from successfully suing it, much less actually finding out what happened that night.

The government, far too often, insulates the worst of its employees against the public that’s entrusted it with power. In many ways, the system is deliberately designed to push citizens towards resigned acceptance of abuse by authority figures. The courts, meant to be a check against government power, have been far too compliant for far too long. The end result is the ugliness above where no one in a position of power will do anything to assist constituents until forced to. And they’ll will follow this up by doing as possible to deter future acts of violence and brutality. The cops involved in this arrest — and every government official that’s assisted in erecting a wall between police and accountability — should take a good, long look at the terrorized teen captured by the police cruiser’s camera and see if they still feel comfortable with their decisions.

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