PHOENIX — In the throes of a mental health crisis, Akeem Terrell didn’t know where he was, who he was talking to, or why he was in the backseat of a Phoenix police cruiser outside the Maricopa County jail intake facility.
Body camera video shows the 31-year-old making little sense and telling officers, “This is just a game. This is just a show.”
But Terrell would also say something haunting and prophetic.
“If I leave out this car, I’m dead.”
Just six minutes later, nearly a dozen Phoenix police and sheriff’s detention officers would leave him prone (facedown), handcuffed, and completely unresponsive in an isolation cell.
Terrell, who was picked up for trespassing at a 2021 New Year's party, would be pronounced dead at the hospital.
“There was no reason for him to die,” said Jesse Showalter, an attorney now suing on behalf of Terrell’s family. “He should not have died. He came into the jail alive, and what these officers did left him dead.”
The Phoenix Police Department and Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, agencies both under federal scrutiny for deep-rooted problems, declined to comment due to ongoing litigation.
ABC15 reviewed body camera video and jail surveillance video as well as police reports, interview transcripts, and medical records. Experts said the public record raises serious questions about the training and culture for front-line officers inside both agencies.
Just as concerning: A joint decision made in the jail parking lot by Phoenix police and MCSO to split the homicide investigation with an agreement not to interview each other’s officers.
“There are so many aspects of this situation that beg, or scream, to be examined,” said Dr. Keith Taylor, a former New York Police Department executive who spent years overseeing jails and now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
He continued: “I think it’s important to provide the scrutiny you are providing to this case. It may be the tip of the iceberg.”
THE NIGHT AKEEM TERRELL DIED
On January 1, 2021, Terrell began behaving strangely at a party with witnesses reporting that he was being paranoid and not making any sense, according to police records and body camera video.
Phoenix officers arrived and told Terrell they would not arrest him if he would leave the apartment. But he refused, and Terrell was placed under arrest.
When Terrell got to the Maricopa County jail intake facility, he refused to get out of the back of the Phoenix police vehicle. So, officers pulled him out of the car and dragged him into the jail.
The below video shows surveillance footage of Terrell being brought into the jail. Viewer discretion is advised.
Terrell, who was 6’2" and weighed 430 pounds, did not “actively resist,” according to officers involved. Instead, he “passively resisted” by being “dead weight” and “going limp.”
Officers dragged Terrell into the jail while he continued to shout things that made little or no sense.
Once Terrell got to his feet, officers pushed him into what’s called a “pre-isolation” cell.
Inside, a handful of officers almost immediately grabbed Terrell’s feet, pulled them out from under him, and then piled on his legs and back to change out his handcuffs from police cuffs to jail cuffs.
For three minutes, the officers were kneeling on top of Terrell, whose head and neck were pushed up against the wall. After the cuffs were switched, the officers got up and backed out of the room.
Jail surveillance video shows Terrell is clearly unresponsive and motionless.
Several times officers peered into the cell through a window, but no one would go in to check on him for more than five minutes.
When they did, a medical team was immediately alerted and rescue crews were called.
Terrell would be pronounced dead at the hospital.
The Maricopa Medical Examiner’s Office listed the cause of death as undetermined.
But the autopsy showed Terrell had no drugs in his system and a primary cause of death was listed as “prone physical restraint with torso compression.”
‘LEFT HIM TO DIE’
In their lawsuit, Terrell’s family alleges that officers used excessive force and then left him to die.
Dr. Taylor agrees.
“It’s hard to argue that they did not leave him to die,” he said. “There appears to be a clear lack of concern for this person’s life. If there wasn’t contempt, there was absolutely indifference.”
Taylor agreed to review the video and records related to the case before giving ABC15 his analysis of the incident, response, and resulting police investigation.
The retired NYPD cop turned professor believes this is a case that highlights significant top-to-bottom issues within both the Phoenix police and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
“It may be indicative that they are incapable of policing themselves,” Taylor said.
One of the key things that stood out to Taylor was how officers kept and then left Terrell in the prone position -- laying facedown and also restrained.
“It has been the primary cause of death for individuals with encounters with police while they are being detained in many instances across the country for a long period of time,” he said.
Police have been warned about the dangers of the prone position for nearly 30 years.
In June 1995, the Department of Justice issued a three-page memo. It was titled, “Positional Asphyxia – Sudden Death.”
Months before Terrell’s death, the prone position would again receive national attention due to George Floyd’s murder.
To Taylor, another aspect of the case stands out: The decision to abruptly and aggressively take Terrell down to swap out his handcuffs.
“Clearly the consequences of having it done right then and there as opposed to a better time and date, could clearly have had lethal consequences,” Taylor said.
During post-incident interviews, several officers claimed they asked Terrell to get down on his knees in the isolation cell so they could swamp out the handcuffs but he refused.
But body camera video does not clearly show that ever happened.
“Nowhere in the body camera do you hear any warnings, or any commands given to Akeem, before they begin pulling his legs out from under him,” said Showalter, the attorney for Terrell’s family.
Surveillance video shows it’s about five seconds from when Terrell is brought into the isolation cell to when officers take him to the ground.
Taylor believes the most troubling aspect of the case is how officers left Terrell.
“It looked like willful ignorance of that status of the individual’s health,” he said. “He was lying unconscious, prone, with possibly no signs of life, and they walked out as if it was a normal interaction.”
He added, “There’s an old saying that if you want to look at how developed a society is, you look at their prisons. Abuse is easy to occur behind prison walls.”
THE ‘SPLIT’ INVESTIGATION
In the hours following Terrell’s death, Phoenix and MCSO officials were confused about how to handle the homicide investigation, records show.
Phoenix detectives arrived at the county jail first, causing MCSO to scramble to get their own investigators at the intake facility.
In the parking lot, the two agencies came to an unusual agreement: The investigation would be split.
Phoenix would investigate what happened up until the jailhouse doors, and MCSO would handle what happened after.
The two sides also would not interview each other’s officers.
In the below interview clip, an MCSO investigator briefly explained what was happening to a detention sergeant.
DETECTIVE: I’ll just be extremely frank with you. And kind of like we explained off tape, Sarg was – apparently Phoenix PD is going to be handling the investigation up until our facility door.
SERGEANT: Mm-hmm.
DETECTIVE: And that’s where this transitioned. We’re – We’re running point on it, but we’re basically investigating stuff from the door to what happened…
SERGEANT: Right.
DETECTIVE: That’s why we’re not involved with any of Phoenix PD’s people. They’re doing that. And that’s why also we pushed to talk to our people too.
SERGEANT: Right.
Incident reports show that the plan was also accepted by Maricopa County Attorney’s Office Director of Investigations Tom Van Dorn, who’s a former Phoenix police commander.
To Terrell’s family and lawyers, the split investigation shows a clear attempt to minimize and cover up what happened from the very beginning.
“There’s no single person who seems to be driving the investigation. It makes no sense,” Showalter said. "What I don’t understand is when you have a complex case like that, when you have personnel from two different law enforcement agencies that cause a death, why not bring the Department of Public Safety or some other independent agency to look at this and find out what happened?”
Taylor also said an outside agency “absolutely” should have been brought in especially since both agencies disagreed about who had custody of Terrell.
During interviews, MCSO officers placed primary responsibility for Terrell on Phoenix police because he had not been officially booked into the jail yet.
“If both agencies are saying we didn’t have custody and control of this individual, then there’s clearly a gap in terms of responsibility,” Taylor said. “It may speak to this idea that he was everyone’s responsibility and no one’s responsibility.”
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office cleared all officers of criminal wrongdoing.
As for any discipline, internal investigations for both Phoenix and MCSO are still not completed more than two years after the death.
Phoenix police are under a sweeping Department of Justice investigation, which was launched in August 2021. The DOJ is examining many areas of the department, including deadly use of force and how Phoenix investigates its own officers.
As for MCSO, Sheriff Paul Penzone was found in contempt of court because his office’s ongoing failure to conduct timely internal investigations. In many cases, the backlog is years long.
Contact ABC15 Chief Investigator Dave Biscobing at Dave@ABC15.com.