After the murder of George Floyd, some states looked to independent agencies to examine deaths in police custody. But dozens of cases handled by the Texas Rangers show the approach has flaws.
By Michael LaForgia and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
Sept. 25, 2021
When the Texas Rangers learned that a woman had died in a jail south of Dallas, they put Adam Russell on the case.
He found that there had been a struggle between the woman, Kelli Leanne Page, 46, who was being held on drug charges, and two guards, who entered her cell because she would not stop banging a hairbrush against the door.
One jailer threw her to the floor, punched her in the face while they scuffled and piled atop her as blood streamed from her nose. The other, a trainee weighing 390 pounds, pinned her down until she stopped breathing.
Six hours into his investigation, Ranger Russell indicated in his notes, he was not inclined to blame the guards for her death. And when an autopsy later determined that Ms. Page was the victim of a homicide — having died on Oct. 8, 2017, of a form of asphyxiation — Ranger Russell appeared not to reconsider.
Instead, he obtained a second opinion from a retired chief medical examiner, who read the forensic report and said he believed that heart disease might have led to her death while she was being restrained. Ranger Russell later testified that the initial autopsy was a rush to judgment and that “something inside Kelli” had killed her. The guards were not charged.
For many years, Texas has made its state investigators, the fabled Rangers, available to review deaths that occur in the custody of local authorities, filling a need that is especially pressing in rural areas. After the murder of George Floyd last year by a Minneapolis police officer, at least seven other states have embraced a similar approach to Texas’, reasoning that outside inquiries are more likely to hold wrongdoers accountable.
But state agents do not necessarily lead to better investigations or greater accountability, according to a New York Times examination of the record in Texas. Drawing on dozens of interviews and more than 6,000 pages of investigative files, autopsy reports, police records and court filings, The Times found that state investigations can be afflicted by the same shortcuts and pro-police biases that outside interventions are meant to eliminate.
State investigators in Texas review deaths in custody more often than in any other state, records show, making it a rich laboratory for studying how the investigations play out. The Rangers, in response to a public records request, provided The Times with roughly 300 case files completed since 2015, while other documents were obtained from local police departments, medical examiners and court proceedings.
Some of the Rangers’ investigations offer a textbook example of dogged police work, like the one into the overdose death of James Dean Davis, 42, in the La Salle County jail in 2017. Ranger Randy Garcia meticulously documented the neglect by guards who mocked Mr. Davis as he screamed for help from the floor of his cell, interviewing more than a dozen witnesses and reviewing video footage and audio recordings — and securing indictments against two jailers for tampering with government records.
In other instances, the Rangers fell short of basic standards. They did not speak to all relevant witnesses, delegated investigative tasks to the agencies under review and failed to follow up on signs that officers were negligent or behaving dangerously. In the death of Ms. Page, Mr. Russell sided with the two guards over 10 pathologists who conduct autopsies in Dallas County, home to one of the state’s largest medical examiners’ offices.
The Times shared its findings with a half-dozen veteran homicide detectives and policing experts in six states, all of whom emphasized that death investigations range widely in difficulty and circumstances. When officers shoot and kill someone, for example, many of the facts are not in dispute, particularly the manner of death, and the pressure mostly falls on prosecutors to decide whether to treat the killing as a criminal act.
It gets more complicated when no shots are fired, they said, and there is a struggle in which the person in custody stops breathing. A deep examination of those investigations offers hints about the thoroughness of the outside police work because state investigators must retrace how officers used their hands, feet and body weight at every turn — and determine whether those actions were appropriate.
The Times identified 29 cases the Rangers had investigated since 2015 in which a person stopped breathing after struggling with local authorities. None of those inquiries led prosecutors to charge anyone in law enforcement. In two-thirds of the cases, The Times found shortcuts, missteps or judgment calls that some veteran homicide detectives said might indicate a lack of effort on the Rangers’ part. For example:
* After Genaro Rocha II, 47, died in an Amarillo jail in 2019, bound in a harness and left in a cell because guards said he’d kicked them, the Ranger did not record a single interview in his case file.
* The Ranger who reviewed the 2018 death of Andrew Carmona, 36, east of San Antonio, started his investigation 11 days afterward, because local officials told him they did not need him there right away. He never visited the scene, a front yard in which an officer had held Mr. Carmona by the head and neck because he was acting “frantically.” And he conducted one interview — with a toxicologist.
* The Ranger investigating the death of Michael Cassel, 41, in Tyler County in 2016 provided video footage to lawyers for the sheriff’s deputies involved before taking their statements. The deputies, who had struggled with Mr. Cassel in the woods near a road, heard him complain that he could not breathe before he lost consciousness and died, records show.
The Texas Rangers who handled the various cases declined or did not respond to requests for interviews, and the Rangers’ parent agency, the Department of Public Safety, would not make any official available to answer questions. A spokeswoman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
It is a reality of policing in Texas and elsewhere that people sometimes die in custody, through no fault of the arresting officers. When officers do cross the line, investigators play an important role in holding them responsible. But the cases are often a lower priority than other duties because of the many demands placed on police agencies and the general reluctance among law enforcement officials to assign blame to their own.
“I guarantee you this is not a sought-after assignment for the Texas Rangers,” said Adam Bercovici, a former homicide lieutenant for the Los Angeles Police Department who works as a consultant and reviewed case files for The Times. “Nobody wants them, because 99 percent of the time it’s just an unfortunate set of circumstances. But it’s a lot of work to dot all the I’s and cross the T’s.”
There was no shortage of facts to examine in the death of Ms. Page. Guards at the jail had a history of misconduct, court records show, including one who put pepper spray in an inmate’s food, landing him in the hospital. The day before Ms. Page’s fatal encounter with two other guards, she angered one of them by splashing him with a cleaning solution through the food slot in her cell. She suffered a black eye when he restrained her.
