Family Sues CMPD for Wrongful Death in Custody

The family of a man who died while restrained by CMPD officers in 2022 filed a wrongful death suit against the city and four officers with the department on the three-year anniversary of his death.

Jovontay Williams was tackled to the ground, handcuffed and placed prone while an officer held him down from behind during an incident that occurred on June 13, 2022.

While restrained, Williams can be heard pleading with officers, “I can’t breathe … I’m about to die, bruh, I swear to God I’m about to die … I feel lightheaded … Please, God. I’m seeing double … Help me, help me … If I die, this on you … What are you doing? I can’t breathe.”

An autopsy report later found that Williams died of restraint/positional asphyxia.

“This was not a split-second mistake,” stated Micheal L. Littlejohn Jr., a civil rights attorney representing the Williams family, in a release on Tuesday. “This was a slow, visible suffocation, with someone begging for air — captured on video, documented in an autopsy, and entirely preventable.”

The family is seeking a jury trial and damages for the officers’ “excessive force and deliberate indifference” in addition to liability from the city, which they say directly enabled the preventable in-custody death, according to the release.

Shortly after 2 a.m. on the night of the incident, police responded to a call about a disturbance in which someone had reportedly fired shots into a home and was banging on a resident’s door.

Body-worn camera footage shows police confront Williams on the porch of a home. He appears to be in distress before they make contact with him, screaming and shrieking while alone on the porch. Police see that he is unarmed and announce as much to each other before moving on Williams.

After police restrain Williams, one officer can be heard telling him “You’re good, bro” in response to his pleas of desperation. Another officer later points out that Williams is “stiffening up like a board.”

Medic arrives at the scene to administer care around 20 minutes after police called them in for assistance, but Williams has become unresponsive and lethargic by then. He would lose consciousness at the scene and never regain it.

The Williams family commissioned a second autopsy following his death, enrolling Nebraska Institute of Forensic Sciences, Inc., Director Matthias I. Okoye, M.D., to carry out the examination.

“In view of the clinical history and review of the hospital medical records and the police video at the scene and the findings at the second autopsy, the cause of death in this Black male, Jovontay Avery Williams, is restraint asphyxia/positional asphyxia by the police while under the police restraint and custody,” wrote Okoye in his summary.

The 62-page lawsuit also challenges the city’s role in authorizing the type of restraint that killed Williams, pointing out that CMPD Directive 500-003, which was changed following Williams death, “merely discouraged prolonged prone restraint and left airway monitoring, EMS activation and repositioning to officer discretion” at the time of the incident.

“CMPD’s own Directive 500-003 and national training standards emphasize that subjects in medical distress — whether intoxicated, confused, or emotionally disturbed — must be closely monitored, promptly repositioned, and provided with urgent medical intervention,” the lawsuit reads. “CMPD officers ignored these responsibilities even after Mr. Williams verbalized distress and ceased resisting.”

In December 2023, the directive was updated to require officers to roll a restrained subject onto his side “as soon as it is safe;” mandate continuous airway monitoring, immediate removal of restraints, and commencement of CPR upon any loss of consciousness or breathing; and require the immediate dispatch of Medic and/or CFD to the scene, obligating officers to provide a detailed medical hand-off.

“The comprehensive revisions adopted in 2023 underscore that City policymakers knew or reasonably should have known that the 2018 Directive’s omissions posed a substantial and obvious risk of death from restraint asphyxia,” the lawsuit states, “yet they allowed the policy to remain in effect until after Mr. Williams was killed.”

Read more: CMPD Responds to Group Recommendations Resulting From 2023 Incident (2024)

The body-cam footage shows officers rolling Williams onto his side nearly four minutes after he was originally tackled then held prone with his hands behind his back.

CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings told WBTV’s Nick Ochsner, “I think our officers acted appropriately and admirably. They were dealing with a criminal situation that they quickly identified as a medical situation and then based on that they did what they were supposed to do.”