In three weeks, Aswad Thomas, 26, was supposed to be on a plane bound for Holland to live out his dreams of playing professional basketball overseas. The talented young athlete had recently graduated from Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts. He was the first man in his family to graduate from college, a fact he was immensely proud of — and his future looked brighter than ever.

But on August 24, 2009, everything came crashing down.

Thomas was shot twice in the back during an attempted robbery at a convenience store in his neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut. He survived, but his injuries ended his burgeoning basketball career.

“My doctors and nurses told me about the physical challenges,” reflects Thomas. “But they never told me about the psychological effects of being a victim of gun violence and the traumatic experience of having to live in the same place where you got shot.”

Unfortunately, Thomas wasn’t a stranger to gun violence or the way the system handles survivors. “I come from a family of victims of gun violence,” explains Thomas. “My father was shot in the 80s. My second oldest brother was shot in the 90s. I have two cousins that were shot as well. I came from a deep-rooted family history of victimization. And the majority of us never got any support services.”

However, Thomas says the cyclical nature of what was happening in his community didn’t fully click until his doctor shared news that would change his entire perspective.

Shocking Revelation

“As my doctor was performing surgery on me, he started to tell me a story of another person he treated four years before me who also came from the same neighborhood,” recalls Thomas.

As the details kept pouring in, Thomas realized he recognized the young man the doctor was describing — he was one of the teens who’d shot him.

At that moment, Thomas felt pity for the teen, who was only 14 years old when he was shot, and only a few years older when he’d shot Thomas. “I strongly feel like his unaddressed trauma, his lack of support services for him and his family played a key role in me getting shot,” he explains.

At the trial, Thomas had a chance to speak with the teen. “I wanted to let him know I wasn’t angry anymore. I wanted to let him know that I forgive him,” he says. “And that whenever he would get out of prison one day, I’d be there to help support him.”

Thomas pleaded with prosecutors to offer the teen a plea deal, which he urged the young man to accept. Instead of 40 years, he was sentenced to six to ten years in prison.

But Thomas didn’t stop there.

With his basketball career over, Thomas decided to dedicate his life to a new dream — combining support for survivors with criminal justice advocacy.

A Voice for Survivors

In the years since the shooting, Thomas, who currently serves as the National Director of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, has worked to advocate for survivors of violent crime.

On Thursday, the Office for Victims of Crime awarded Thomas with the 2024 Office of Victims of Crime Survivors Voices award. The ceremony took place during National Crime Victim’s Rights Week.

Thomas, who also serves as the Vice President of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, says he’s proud of himself for taking all of his “pain and all the trauma” and using it to make a difference. “It’s very hard work, right? You’re organizing people who’ve been through the worst kind of experience you could imagine,” he says. “But it’s the work that’s so needed to make sure that survivors have a support system.”

For Thomas, helping survivors means going deeper than the individual level, it’s also about ending the cycle of violence that occurs in communities all across the United States.

“It’s extremely important for crime victims to uplift what safety looks like to us, and safety isn’t just locking people up and throwing away the key,” he argues.

If we want safer communities we can’t keep pushing the same failed policies, says Thomas. “Safety is actually enrolling people in systems of care by establishing more trauma recovery centers. Safety is about Wearable Solutions that’ve been proven to stop the cycle of violence, he says. “It’s also the community violence intervention programs. It’s more substance abuse and drug treatment programs and most victims want us to prevent crime from happening in the first place and invest in things that make communities safer.”

18

Grammy-winning country artist Kacey Musgraves reportedly joined forces with global icon Beyoncé for her highly anticipated Cowboy Carter album. Despite their creative synergy, none of Musgraves’ contributions ultimately made it onto the final tracklist.

The revelation came to light during an interview with INK, a producer involved in the album’s creation, who disclosed the intensive one-day session that yielded five songs. “I met Kacey because Parkwood, Beyoncé’s company, sent us down there, and it was (Beyoncé’s) idea for us to just go to Nashville,” INK revealed, highlighting Musgraves’ exceptional talent and the collaborative energy that permeated the studio.

As the buzz surrounding Cowboy Carter reached a fever pitch, Musgraves herself weighed in on Beyoncé’s foray into the country music genre. In an interview with The American Songwriter, Musgraves expressed her nonchalant attitude toward Beyoncé’s artistic exploration, stating, “The more the f—ing merrier. I don’t really care. It doesn’t affect what I’m doing. It doesn’t affect me. I’ve always been just doing my own thing. It’s just fun to watch.”

While the absence of Musgraves’ contributions from the Cowboy Carter tracklist may come as a disappointment to fans eagerly anticipating the fusion of their respective styles, the collaborative effort between two musical powerhouses remains a testament to the boundless creativity and cross-genre experimentation prevalent in today’s music landscape.

About The Author

Related

NEW YORK (AP) — When Anna Branch, 37, had her hours at work reduced in 2019, she suddenly noticed ads for an app called EarnIn.

“You know how they get you — the algorithms — like they’re reading your mind,” Branch said. “The ad said I could get up to $100 this week and repay it in my next pay period.”

Branch, who was working as an administrative assistant in Charleston, South Carolina, downloaded the app and added the suggested “tip.” The cash helped her cover expenses until payday, when the app debited the borrowed $100, plus $14 for tip. Five years later, Branch said she still uses the app, as often as once a month.

EarnIn is one of more than a dozen companies that provide this service, billed as Earned Wage Access. The apps extend small short-term loans to workers in between paychecks so they can pay bills and meet everyday needs. On payday, the user repays the money out of their wages. Between 2018 and 2020, transaction volume tripled from $3.2 billion to $9.5 billion, according to Datos Insights.

While Earned Wage Access apps have been around for over a decade, the pandemic and its aftermath boosted their popularity. Some apps have approachable human names — like Dave, Clio, Albert, and Brigit — while others suggest financial freedom: Empower, FloatMe, FlexWage, Rain. The typical user earns less than $50,000 a year, according to the Government Accountability Office, and has experienced the pinch of two years of high inflation.

Proponents of the apps say they help people living paycheck to paycheck manage their finances and avoid the need for more onerous options, such as payday loans or overdrawing a bank account. But some analysts, consumer advocates and lawmakers say the apps are actually payday loans in a new tech wrapper, and that they can trap users in an endless cycle of borrowing that depletes their earnings.

Critics also say the costs of the loans are not always transparent. Many charge monthly subscription fees and most charge mandatory fees for instant transfers of funds, though there is typically a no-cost option to receive funds in one to three business days. The average APR for a loan repaid in seven to 14 days was 367%, a rate comparable to payday lending, according to a report from the Center for Responsible Lending.

Muddying the waters is the fact that some employers have integrated Earned Wage Access apps into their payroll, with different costs, models, and fee structures. Amazon and Walmart, for example, do not always charge employees for early access to earned wages outside of regular pay periods.

‘They get you hooked’

Sheri Wilkins, 60, who works as a home health aide in College Station, Texas, said she’s used the apps since 2020, and that she feels “dependent on the money.”

The health care contractor that employs Wilkins offers DailyPay, and Wilkins typically uses the app to transfer the amount of that day’s wages ($10.60 an hour) twice a day — once after each of her two shifts, for which she’s paid separately. Each time, she pays a $3.49 fee, for a total of $7 a day. At $35 a week, the app eats up more than three hours of her pay weekly, or a-day-and-a-half’s work per month.

“They get you hooked on having that money,” Wilkins said. “It’s fine and great to have it — to buy groceries and cigarettes — but when it comes time to have your paycheck, it’s only $50-$60.”

Wilkins said she was not aware the app had a free option, which would transfer the money in one to three days. She said the app always directed her to the instant transfer option.

A spokesperson for DailyPay said in a statement that the app offers two options with no fees to most users and a third with what they described as a “small ATM-like fee.”

Matt Bahl, who researches workplace issues for the Financial Health Network, said the growth of the Earned Wage Access industry is a symptom of widespread financial insecurity.

“It’s meant to help solve short-term liquidity challenges,” he said. “But if those challenges are the result of insufficient income, it won’t solve them. You can’t ‘tech’ your way out of material deficits.”

The tips

Andrew Lewis, 32, who lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, said he uses EarnIn, in part to meet unexpected expenses. Lewis works as a process technician for an electronics manufacturing company, and said he sometimes uses the app as often as every week, for gas money or something his toddler or wife needs.

Lewis usually pays the “tips” the apps suggest, he said, but he doesn’t “like them that much,” in part because of the messaging.

“Tips keep us running for millions of members like you,” EarnIn’s in-app copy reads. The company says it uses tips to maintain a no-fee option.

“I feel a little guilty because of how they make it sound,” Lewis said.

In 2021, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation found “users often feel compelled to leave (tips) due to applied pressure tactics like… claiming tips are used to support other vulnerable consumers or for charitable purposes.”

In its report, the department found that borrowers who use Earned Wage Access take out an average of 36 loans a year. On 5.8 million transactions, 73% of consumers paid a “tip,” at $4.09 per tip on average. On three dozen loans, that’s $147 annually in tips alone.

Convenience and no credit check

Penny Lee, head of the Financial Technology Association, an industry group, says more people are turning to Earned Wage Access as a convenience that allows them to make up for the “disconnect between what the consumer needs to be able to spend … and their pay cycle.”

Like Buy Now, Pay Later loans, the apps don’t run credit checks and bill themselves as interest-free. Unlike payday loans or auto title loans, where borrowers pledge their vehicles as collateral, users of the apps don’t face balloon payments, black marks on their credit reports, or the possibility of losing their car if they fail to pay. Supporters also say the apps don’t sue or send collectors after unpaid debts.

The FTA says the average cost per use of an Earned Wage Access app is between $2.59 and $6.27. The companies say the charges are comparable to ATM fees and cheaper than overdraft fees, which people incur if they don’t have enough money left in a checking account to cover a bill before payday. The average overdraft fee is more than $25 and can be as high as $36.

Recommended Stories

However, in its report, the Center for Responsible Lending found that users of the apps experienced a 56% increase in checking account overdrafts.

A pivotal moment for regulation

A number of states have moved to regulate Earned Wage Access by capping fees on these products. The industry backs a federal bill, currently before Congress, that would exclude the apps from being regulated by the Truth in Lending Act.

When Connecticut passed a law capping the fees the apps could charge, EarnIn stopped operating in the state. Asked why, EarnIn CEO Ram Palaniappan said it was no longer “economically viable.”

Both California and Hawaii are currently drafting laws to rein in Earned Wage Access fees.

Rep. Bryan Steil, R-WI, one of the federal bill’s backers said, it will “ensure workers across the country can continue to use these services, which help them to better connect work to reward.”

But Hawaii State Sen. Chris Lee, a Democrat who introduced regulation targeting Earned Wage Access in the state Senate, called the 300-plus percentage interest rates a “modern payday loan scheme.” Lee said he would like to see more transparency and worker protections.

Lauren Saunders, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, says this a pivotal moment for regulation.

“If (Earned Wage Access) were being used by people to cover one emergency cost a year, it could be better than being subject to overdraft fees or payday or auto title loans,” she said. “But being better than terrible predatory products shouldn’t be the bar.”

Never miss a beat: Get our daily stories straight to your inbox with theGrio’s newsletter.

13

Amazon MGM Studios’ latest venture into the world of cinema, “Challengers,” served up an ace, seizing the top spot at the box office with a debut of $15 million in ticket sales through April 28th. The R-rated film, boasting a reported production cost of $55 million, stars Zendaya of “Dune” and “Euphoria” fame in a tennis-themed romance drama that captivated audiences.

“Challengers” eclipsed its competition, including Lionsgate and Kingdom Story Company’s joint release, “Unsung Hero,” which garnered an estimated $7.75 million across 2,832 screens in North America. Despite outperforming pre-weekend tracking and boasting a modest $6 million production budget, “Unsung Hero” couldn’t match the fervor generated by the tennis romance.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Entertainment’s colossal clash of titans, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” continued its formidable run, raking in $7.2 million over the weekend. With North American earnings surpassing $181 million and a global haul exceeding $495 million, the monster-filled spectacle maintained its grip on audiences’ attention.

A24’s politically-charged drama, “Civil War,” added $7 million to its North American tally, pushing past $56 million domestically and $71 million worldwide. Universal Pictures’ “Abigail” also contributed to the weekend box office, pulling in an additional $5.2 million in its second weekend, bringing the reimagining of the classic horror tale, “Dracula’s Daughter,” to nearly $19 million in total earnings.

About The Author

Related

No woman had ever preached the keynote sermon at the Joint National Baptist Convention, a gathering of four historically Black Baptist denominations representing millions of people.

That changed in January when the Rev. Gina Stewart took the convention stage in Memphis, Tennessee — the Southern city home to Christ Missionary Baptist Church where she serves as senior pastor — and delivered a rousing message, asserting that Jesus not only included women in his ministry, but identified with their suffering.

But what happened next put a spotlight on the obstacles women in Christian ministry continue to face as they carve out leadership space within the patriarchal culture of the Black Church in America. Several women pastors told The Associated Press that it should serve as the breaking point.

“This is an example of no matter how high you rise as a woman, you’re going to meet patriarchy at the top of the hill,” said Martha Simmons, founder of Women of Color in Ministry, which helps women navigate the process of getting ordained. “The next Norton Anthology of African American preaching is probably 20 years away, but that sermon will be in there.”

Despite the enthusiastic reception for Stewart, the original recording of her historic sermon disappeared from the convention’s Facebook page, setting off a social media firestorm — driven mostly by women — protesting its removal. A recording of the sermon later appeared, but it was followed by accusations the convention edited her closing remarks, which challenges the four allied denominations to support women in ministry.

National Baptist Convention, USA, President Jerry Young did not reply to requests from The Associated Press for comment. He said at another January meeting that he believed the Facebook page had been hacked and he planned to involve the FBI.

“I still don’t know what happened with the sermon, but what is clear is that this was a form of erasure,” Stewart said. “I was just as shocked, stunned and surprised as everyone else.”

It is symptomatic of a larger problem, according to several Black women pastors interviewed by the AP. They emphasized how they were worn down by the physical and psychological toll of working in a male-dominated culture.

In some denominations, women have made progress. The African Methodist Episcopal Church estimates that one-fourth of its total staff are women, including 1,052 ordained ministers.

In the Black Church as a whole, male pastors predominate, though there’s no comprehensive gender breakdown. Simmons estimates that less than one in 10 Black Protestant congregations are led by a woman, even as more Black women are attending seminary.

The conditions aren’t new, but the public discourse over women’s equality in ministry has rapidly gained ground due in large part to the bullhorn social media provides, said Courtney Pace, scholar-in-residence with Memphis-based Equity for Women in the Church. Pace noted how Facebook afforded Eboni Marshall Turman a venue to publicly share her grievances before filing a gender discrimination lawsuit in December against Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York.

The late theologian and civil rights activist Prathia Hall underscores this dynamic, said Pace, who wrote “Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall.” In the book, she details how Hall was a key inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The kind of thing that happened to Gina Stewart happened a lot to Prathia Hall,” Pace said. “When she was doing her work, we did not have social media, or cell phones with voice recorders and cameras in every hand. So who knows what the response to Prathia would have been with an empowered public like we have today.”

Hall was born in Philadelphia in 1940, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. As a youth, she took part in local speech competitions where she melded folk religion and liberation theology.

But not all of Hall’s relationships within the insular preaching fraternity of the National Baptist Convention were as collegial as her relationship with King, whom she said in later years did more with “I have a dream” than she could have.

Many theologically conservative Christian churches, including some Black Protestant denominations, prohibit women from preaching. They frequently cite certain biblical passages, including one they interpret as saying women ought to “be silent” in churches. Even in denominations without explicit bans, women with leadership aspirations often must contend with a patriarchal culture.

Last month, the audience was dotted with young Black women at an event hosted at the Howard Divinity School in Washington. A group convened a panel about the evolution of Black women’s role in the church.

Inside the cavernous Dunbarton Chapel that Howard Divinity shares with the Howard School of Law, a half-dozen Black women representing a range of independent churches and Black Protestant denominations spoke about persevering through instability and transition.

Their current duties, some of the women said, left them exhausted and unable to grieve the members they lost to COVID-19.

One speaker was the Rev. Lyvonne Briggs. In 2019, she was being overworked and underpaid as an assistant pastor of a large Baptist church in California. Her marriage dissolved.

She restarted her life in Atlanta. During the lockdown one Sunday morning in her apartment, Briggs went live on Instagram and held a self-styled worship space for 25 people to share their experiences. It became known as The Proverbial Experience, which Briggs describes as an “African-centered, womanist series of spiritual gatherings to nourish the soul.”

In two years, Briggs grew her church into a digital community of 3,000. She also wrote “Sensual Faith: The Spiritual Art of Coming Back to Your Body,” a treatise on liberation from the sexual politics and objectification of Black women’s bodies in the church setting.

“I don’t ascribe to this idea that the Black Church is dead,” Briggs told the AP. “But I do acknowledge and promote that we have to eulogize what it used to be so that we can birth something new.”

Recommended Stories

One preacher who fashions himself an expert on the topic of women’s role in the church, Walter Gardner of the Newark Church of Christ in Newark, N.J, sent a video link of one of his lectures when queried by the AP about his beliefs. At the end of one session, Gardner suggested that women, overall, ignore Scripture and are incapable of being taught.

That’s a mindset Gina Stewart would like to change, on behalf of future generations of Black women.

“I would hope that we can knock down some of those barriers so that their journey would be just a little bit easier,” said Stewart, who has continued to charge forward.

In a given week, her preaching schedule can take her to multiple cities. As an example, she traveled to Washington earlier this month after accepting a sought-after invitation to preach at Howard University’s Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel.

Stewart’s goals mesh with those of Eboni Marshall Turman, who gave the Martin Luther King Jr. Crown Forum lecture in February at Martin Luther King’s alma mater, Morehouse College. In December, after not being named a finalist, she had sued Abyssinian Baptist Church and its pulpit search committee for gender discrimination over its hiring process for its next senior pastor, an assertion the church and the committee disputed. No woman has ever held the post.

A former Abyssinian assistant minister, the Rev. Rashad Raymond Moore, said in an email to The Associated Press that of the several dozen applicants for the senior pastor job, “none were more exciting, promising and refreshing than Eboni Marshall Turman.”

Added Moore, who now is pastor of New York City’s First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, “Pastoral searches in Black congregations, historically socially conservative, are often mired in the politics of discrimination, including biases based on gender, sexual orientation, marital status and age.”

Marshall Turman, a Yale Divinity School professor, offered pointed critiques in her first book at what she deemed the inherent patriarchy of Morehouse’s social gospel justice tradition. She adapted her recent lecture’s title from the last speech ever given by King, the all-male college’s most famous alumni.

The title was blunt: “I’m Not Fearing Any Man.”

Never miss a beat: Get our daily stories straight to your inbox with theGrio’s newsletter.

7

Anitta, the Brazilian sensation, has once again made history in the music world as her latest track, “Savage Funk,” stormed to the top of the iTunes Brazil charts, solidifying her status as the first artist ever to achieve 100 number one hits on the platform in the country.

With “Savage Funk” reigning supreme on iTunes, Anitta’s dominance in the Brazilian music scene is unparalleled, showcasing her unwavering influence and popularity among listeners. This monumental achievement not only underscores her immense talent but also highlights her remarkable connection with her fans.

But the groundbreaking success doesn’t stop there for Anitta. Her album “Funk Generation” has made waves on Spotify, with a staggering debut of 10,783,158 streams on the Brazilian chart. This marks her biggest album debut to date in the country, surpassing her previous record set by “Versions of Me” with 6 million streams.

In addition to her album’s phenomenal reception, Anitta also achieved a personal milestone with her highest streaming day on Spotify, amassing a remarkable 18,264,484 million streams in a single day. This unprecedented feat further cements her position as one of the most streamed artists globally.

Furthermore, Anitta’s impact extends beyond Brazil, as “Funk Generation” secured the third spot among the biggest female Latin album debuts on Spotify in 2024. Despite fierce competition, Anitta’s magnetic blend of funk and pop resonated strongly with audiences, solidifying her place among music’s elite.

About The Author

Related

Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived.

The 43-year-old was surrounded by police who arrested him after responding to a trespassing call in a Wisconsin parking lot. Officers had shocked him with a Taser and pinned him as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. Now he sat on the ground with hands cuffed behind his back and took in oxygen through a mask.

Then, officers moved Jackson to his side so a medic could inject him with a potent knockout drug.

“It’s just going to calm you down,” an officer assured Jackson. Within minutes, Jackson’s heart stopped. He never regained consciousness and died two weeks later.

Jackson’s 2021 death illustrates an often-hidden way fatal U.S. police encounters end: not with the firing of an officer’s gun but with the silent use of a medical syringe.

The practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police has spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Based on thousands of pages of law enforcement and medical records and videos of dozens of incidents, the investigation shows how a strategy intended to reduce violence and save lives has resulted in some avoidable deaths.

At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black, including Jackson.

Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.

The use of sedatives in half these incidents has never been reported, as scrutiny typically focuses on the actions of police, not medics. Elijah McClain’s 2019 death in Aurora, Colorado, was a rare exception: Two paramedics were convicted of giving McClain an overdose of ketamine, the same drug given to Jackson. One was sentenced last month to five years in prison and the other was sentenced Friday to 14 months in jail and probation.

It was impossible to determine the role sedatives may have played in each of the 94 deaths, which often involved the use of other potentially dangerous force on people who had taken drugs or consumed alcohol. Medical experts told the AP their impact could be negligible in people who were already dying; the final straw that triggered heart or breathing failure in the medically distressed; or the main cause of death when given in the wrong circumstances or mishandled.

While sedatives were mentioned as a cause or contributing factor in a dozen official death rulings, authorities often didn’t even investigate whether injections were appropriate. Medical officials have traditionally viewed them as mostly benign treatments. Now some say they may be playing a bigger role than previously understood and deserve more scrutiny.

Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.

Paramedics drugged some people who were not a threat to themselves or others, violating treatment guidelines. Medics often didn’t know whether other drugs or alcohol were in people’s systems, although some combinations cause serious side effects.

Police officers sometimes improperly encouraged paramedics to give shots to suspects they were detaining.

Responders occasionally joked about the medications’ power to knock their subjects out. “Night, night” is heard on videos before deaths in California, Tennessee and Florida.

Emergency medical workers, “if they aren’t careful, can simply become an extension of the police’s handcuffs, of their weapons, of their nightsticks,” said Claire Zagorski, a former paramedic and an addiction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

Supporters say sedatives enable rapid treatment for drug-related behavioral emergencies and psychotic episodes, protect front-line responders from violence and are safely administered thousands of times annually to get people with life-threatening conditions to hospitals. Critics say forced sedation should be strictly limited or banned, arguing the medications, given without consent, are too risky to be administered during police encounters.

Ohio State University professor Dr. Mark DeBard was an important early proponent of sedation, believing it could be used in rare cases when officers encountered extremely agitated people who needed rapid medical treatment. Today, he said he’s frustrated officers still sometimes use excessive force instead of treating those incidents as medical emergencies. He’s also surprised paramedics have given unnecessary injections by overdiagnosing excited delirium.

Others say the premise was flawed, with sedatives and police restraint creating a dangerous mix. The deaths have left a trail of grieving relatives from coast to coast.

“They’re running around on the streets administering these heavy-duty medications that could be lethal,” said Honey Gutzalenko, a nurse whose husband died after he was injected with midazolam in 2021 while restrained by police near San Francisco. “It’s just not right.”

‘I’m begging you to stop’

Jackson was standing on a truck outside a radio station on the border of the small Wisconsin cities of Eau Claire and Altoona. An employee called 911 before dawn on Oct. 8, 2021, hoping officers could shoo away a stranger who “doesn’t seem to be a threat, but not normal either.”

Police video and hundreds of pages of law enforcement and medical records show how the incident escalated.

An Altoona police officer met Jackson in the parking lot. Jackson appeared uneasy and paranoid, looking around and talking softly. He had taken methamphetamine, which a psychiatrist said he used to self-medicate for schizophrenia. He’d been in and out of jail and living on the streets, with frequent visits to the emergency room seeking a place to rest.

The officer, joined by a second Altoona officer and a sheriff’s deputy, told him he could leave if he gave his name. Jackson refused.

Police identified him through his tattoos, learning he was on probation for meth possession. They noticed the truck had minor damage and decided to arrest him.

Jackson took off running. The officers chased Jackson, who stopped seconds later and staggered toward the first officer. Body-camera video shows she fired her Taser, its darts striking Jackson in the stomach and thigh. He screamed after the electrical shock and collapsed.

When officers couldn’t handcuff Jackson, she fired additional darts, striking Jackson in the back as he lay on the ground. Officers from the Eau Claire Police Department forced Jackson onto his stomach to be handcuffed and restrained him in what’s known as the prone position.

“I’m begging you to stop,” Jackson said. “I can’t breathe.”

After a couple of minutes, officers moved him to his side and then sat him up, trying to improve his breathing.

An officer wondered aloud whether Jackson had “excited delirium” and asked a colleague if paramedics were “going to stand around and do nothing.” He voiced approval when one arrived with ketamine, adding Jackson would not like it “when he gets poked.”

The Eau Claire Fire Department’s excited delirium protocol advises, “Rapid sedation is the key to de-escalation!!!!!” The medic measured 400 milligrams after estimating the 6-foot-tall Jackson weighed 175 pounds, enough to immobilize someone within minutes. He injected the medicine into Jackson’s buttocks.

Five medical experts who reviewed the case for AP said Jackson’s behavior did not appear to be dangerous enough to justify the intervention.

“I don’t believe he was a candidate for ketamine,” said Connecticut paramedic Peter Canning, who said he supports sedating truly violent patients because they stop fighting and are sleeping by the time they get to the hospital.

Minutes later, Jackson stopped breathing on the way to Sacred Heart Hospital. He’d suffered cardiac arrest and, after he was resuscitated, had no brain function.

Jackson’s mother, Rita Gowens, collapsed while shopping at an Indiana Walmart when she learned her oldest son was hospitalized and not expected to survive.

Gowens rushed to the hospital 500 miles away, where she was told he’d been injected with ketamine. She searched online and was stunned to read it’s used to tranquilize horses.

Gowens spoke to Jackson, held his hand and hoped for a miracle. She eventually agreed to remove him from a ventilator after his condition didn’t improve, singing into his ear as he took his final breaths: “You’ve never lost a battle, and I know, I know, you never will.”

She still has nightmares about how police and medics treated her son, whom she recalls as a happy boy with chunky cheeks that inspired the nickname “Meatball.” There are few days when she doesn’t ask, “Why did they give him an animal tranquilizer?”

Ketamine moves to the streets

The practice of using ketamine to subdue people outside hospitals began in 2004 when a disturbed man scaled a fence, cut himself with a broken bottle and paced along a narrow strip of concrete on a Minneapolis highway bridge.

The man was in danger of falling into traffic below when officers reached through the fence and grabbed him.

Dr. John Hick, who worked with first responders, heard the emergency radio chatter while driving and rushed to the scene with an idea. Hick gave the man two shots of ketamine, started an IV and kept him breathing with an air mask.

The man stopped struggling, and responders lowered him to safety.

Paramedics had occasionally used other sedatives to calm combative people since the 1980s. Hick and his Hennepin County Medical Center colleague Dr. Jeffrey Ho believed ketamine worked faster and had fewer side effects, showing promise to avert fatal police encounters.

Ho was a leading researcher on Taser safety and an expert witness for the company in wrongful death lawsuits. In a 2007 deposition in one such case, he argued for a potentially “life-saving tactic” of having sedative injections quickly follow Taser shocks, saying the combination could shorten struggles that, if prolonged, might end in death.

Some doctors at his public hospital in Minneapolis were using “something called ketamine, which is an analog to LSD,” he said. “It’s sort of an animal tranquilizer.”

The drug became more common outside the hospital in 2008 when Hennepin County paramedics were given permission to use it.

An American College of Emergency Physicians panel that included Ho said in 2009 that ketamine had shown “excellent results and safety” while acknowledging no research proved it would save lives.

In time, its use became standard from Las Vegas to Columbus, Ohio, to Palm Beach County, Florida. The earliest death involving ketamine documented in AP’s investigation came in 2015, when 34-year-old Juan Carrizales was injected after struggling with police in the Dallas suburb of Garland, Texas.

Shortly after ketamine became authorized for such use in Arizona in 2017, deputies who were restraining David Cutler facedown in handcuffs in the scorching desert asked a paramedic to sedate him.

The medic testified he was surprised when Cutler stopped breathing, although the dose was larger than recommended for someone weighing 132 pounds. He said he had been trained that ketamine didn’t impact respiration. Cutler’s death was ruled an accident due to heat exposure and LSD — though that was disputed by experts hired by Cutler’s family, who said heat stroke along with ketamine caused his death.

In Minneapolis, an oversight agency found the use of ketamine during police calls rose dramatically from 2012 through 2017 and body-camera video showed instances of officers appearing to pressure paramedics to use ketamine and joking about its power. The department told officers they could never “suggest or demand” the use of sedation.

Facing criticism, Hennepin Healthcare halted a study examining the effectiveness of ketamine on agitated patients. The Food and Drug Administration later found the research failed to protect vulnerable, intoxicated people who had not given consent.

By 2021, the American College of Emergency Physicians warned ketamine impacted breathing and the heart more than previously believed.

“Ketamine is not as benign as we might have hoped it to be,” a co-author of the new position, Dr. Jeffrey Goodloe, said on the group’s podcast in 2022.

He said the practice of giving large doses of ketamine, sometimes too much for smaller patients, had spread nationwide as agencies copied each other’s protocols with little independent review.

But the AP’s findings show risks of sedation go beyond ketamine, which was used in at least 19 cases.

Roughly half of the 94 deaths documented by the AP came after the use of midazolam, which has long been known to heighten the risk of respiratory depression. Many came during police encounters in California, where ketamine is not widely used. Midazolam, a common pre-surgery drug known by the brand name Versed, is also part of a three-drug cocktail used in some states to execute prisoners.

Other cases involved a range of other drugs, including the antipsychotic medications haloperidol and ziprasidone, which can cause irregular heartbeats.

The need for monitoring side effects is often laid out for paramedics in written guidelines, many of which are based on the disputed belief that excited delirium can cause sudden death.

The history of ‘excited delirium’

The theory of excited delirium was troubling from the start.

In the 1980s, with cocaine use soaring, Dr. Charles Wetli, a Miami forensic pathologist, coined the term to explain a handful of deaths of violent cocaine users, many of whom had been restrained by police. Wetli, who died in 2020, also blamed excited delirium for the mysterious deaths of more than a dozen Black women. He said cocaine and sexual activity triggered the fatal condition.

The women’s deaths eventually were attributed to a serial killer. Wetli’s theory survived. And over time, symptoms described by Wetli and others — “superhuman strength,” animal-like noises and high pain tolerance — became disproportionately assigned to Black people. The terms spread to police and emergency medical services to describe certain agitated people — and explain sudden deaths.

By the mid-2000s, police were encountering more drug users and mentally ill people as stimulant use increased and psychiatric hospitals closed. Departments adopted Tasers as a less-lethal alternative to firearms, but there was a problem — hundreds died after being jolted.

Supporters of Wetli’s research, including the medical examiner in Miami-Dade County, ruled again and again that excited delirium was the cause of these deaths, not the effects of the weapons and other physical force. Executives at Taser’s manufacturer agreed, promoting excited delirium to medical examiners around the country and retaining experts who explained the concept to juries in wrongful death lawsuits.

In 2006, a grand jury that investigated Taser-related deaths in Miami-Dade recommended an untested treatment that it said could save people before they died from excited delirium: squirting midazolam up their noses to cause “almost immediate sedation.” Its report acknowledged they “may experience difficulty in breathing.” Miami-Dade paramedics adopted this treatment.

But key medical groups didn’t recognize excited delirium, and activists were calling for limits on Taser use. What happened next would help promote sedation alongside Tasers as tools to gain control.

In 2008, the biggest names in excited delirium research gathered at a Las Vegas hotel for a three-day meeting organized by a group with ties to Taser’s manufacturer.

“A lot of talk took place on chemical sedation because the cops didn’t know what to do with these people,” recalled John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, which sponsored the meeting. “Jeff Ho had done some work up in Minnesota. He said, ‘Look. I’ve been using ketamine. It knocks them out quicker.’”

The timing was fortuitous: The American College of Emergency Physicians would soon form a task force to study excited delirium and how police and medics should respond.

The 19-member panel included Ho, who became Taser’s medical director under an arrangement in which the company paid part of his hospital salary; Dr. Donald Dawes, a Taser research consultant; and University of Miami researcher Deborah Mash, who testified for Taser about several deaths she blamed on excited delirium. At least two other panelists were routinely retained by officers and their departments as expert witnesses.

The panel’s 2009 paper disclosed none of these relationships. It found excited delirium was real, could result in death regardless of whether someone was shocked with a Taser and called for “aggressive chemical sedation” to treat the symptoms.

DeBard, the now-retired Ohio doctor who chaired the panel, told AP he recruited relevant experts to join and that disclosure of conflicts wasn’t required by the ER doctors group then. He said Taser didn’t influence the outcome, which reflected the panel’s consensus. Mash said she had no conflict because Taser didn’t fund her research. Dawes declined an interview request. Ho didn’t return messages.

Taser rebranded itself in 2017 as Axon. A spokesperson for the company declined interview requests and did not respond to written questions.

Dr. Brooks Walsh, an emergency physician in Connecticut who was not on the panel, said the 2009 paper reinforced racial bias as it formalized “loaded terms” used to describe excited delirium, influencing how the diagnosis would be applied.

Ho and other Taser- and police-aligned experts joined a federally sponsored panel in 2011 that built on the work, recommending four actions on a checklist for officers and paramedics: Identify excited delirium symptoms; control (with a Taser if necessary); sedate; and transport to a hospital.

No test measures for excited delirium, so paramedics faced a judgment call: Which patients were so agitated, strong, impervious to pain and dangerous that they needed to be sedated?

DeBard said the symptoms were based on medical observations, not race. “If you’ve got somebody that’s delirious, irrational, aggressive, hyperactive, running around naked, I mean, it’s really pretty easy” to recognize, he said.

Yet, over time, prominent medical groups and some experts pointed to overuse of sedation during police encounters and a disproportionate impact on Black people. Even supporters of the practice have acknowledged that the wrong patients at times have been injected.

The deaths of Black men in police custody, including the 2020 killing of George Floyd, put pressure on the medical community to re-examine excited delirium. The ER doctors group in 2023 withdrew approval of the 2009 paper and said excited delirium shouldn’t be used in court testimony. Some doctors called that decision political and note the group still recognizes a similar condition — hyperactive delirium with severe agitation — that can be treated with sedation. But today no major medical association legitimizes excited delirium.

‘Convenient for law enforcement’

In more than a dozen cases reviewed by AP, police asked for or suggested the use of sedatives, calling into question whether medics were working for law enforcement or in patients’ interests. Officers often suggested their detainees had excited delirium.

University of California, Berkeley, law and bioethics professor Osagie Obasogie, who has studied excited delirium and sedation, said officers should be banned from influencing medical care.

“We need to be sure that folks are treated in a way that meets their medical needs and not simply given a chemical restraint because it’s convenient for law enforcement,” he said.

Officers are told not to dictate medical treatment but “some knuckleheads” have done otherwise, said Peters, whose group hosted the 2008 Las Vegas meeting that focused on excited delirium.

Paramedics say they make medical decisions independently from police, following guidelines that call for sedating people who may be dangerous. But in several cases AP found, people were injected though they had calmed down or even passed out after struggles with police.

Recommended Stories

Ivan Gutzalenko, a 47-year-old father, was struggling to breathe as two officers restrained him in Richmond, California. Gutzalenko told the officers they were hurting him, and bucked to try to get one off his back.

A paramedic viewed Gutzalenko’s action as aggression, and went to his ambulance to get a 5-milligram dose of midazolam. When he returned three minutes later, Gutzalenko lay motionless. “He’s faking like he’s unconscious,” an officer said.

The medic plunged the needle into his bicep. Gutzalenko’s heart stopped. He was declared dead at a hospital. A pathologist testified that midazolam was given to “quiet him down” during an episode of excited delirium but did not contribute to the death, which he blamed on prone restraint and meth use.

His wife said Gutzalenko, a former critical care nurse, would never have consented to receive midazolam that day.

“I know from being a registered nurse since 2004, you don’t administer a sedative to someone who is clearly already in respiratory distress,” she said, adding that his death has been devastating to their two teenage children.

Dr. Gail Van Norman, a University of Washington professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine, said it’s dangerous for officers to put pressure on the backs and necks of detainees before and after they’re injected with sedatives.

“It’s a recipe for disaster, because you may have created a situation in which you are impeding a person’s ability to get oxygen,” she said.

The AP investigation found half who died following sedation had been shocked with a Taser and the majority had been restrained facedown.

Their blood acid levels may already have been spiking from drugs, adrenaline and pain while oxygen levels may have been plummeting — life-threatening conditions called acidosis and hypoxia.

Sedatives can dull the instinct to compensate by breathing quickly and heavily to blow off carbon dioxide, essential for the heart to beat, said Dr. Christopher Stephens, a UTHealth Houston anesthesiologist and former paramedic.

Under sedation, he said, the body doesn’t respond as efficiently to the buildup of carbon dioxide. “Your brain doesn’t care as much about it,” Stephens said. “And they can go into respiratory and cardiac arrest.”

Paramedics usually have no idea whether their patients have alcohol, opioids or other depressants in their bodies that increase sedatives’ effects on breathing.

More than a dozen who died had been drinking, including Jerica LaCour, 29, a Colorado Springs, Colorado, mother of five young children.

She was stressed about family finances, husband Anthony LaCour recalled, when deputies found her trespassing at a trucking company.

“Guess who gets ketamine?” paramedic Jason Poulson of AMR, the nation’s largest ambulance company, said as LaCour was restrained on a gurney, according to body-camera footage.

An EMT said in a report that she told Poulson that LaCour had calmed and didn’t need ketamine, and later warned that LaCour was no longer breathing. In a disciplinary agreement with state regulators, Poulson admitted he was unsuccessful in protecting LaCour’s airway despite multiple attempts, mishandled the syringe and failed to document the ketamine use properly. His state certification was put on probation.

AMR and Poulson denied responsibility for LaCour’s death in court filings, arguing LaCour was experiencing excited delirium and ketamine was appropriate. This week they settled a long-pending wrongful death lawsuit, LaCour family attorney Daniel Kay said Friday. He said the settlement amount was confidential and the proceeds would help her children. AMR didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and a man who answered a cellphone number listed for Poulson hung up on a reporter.

After death, sedation goes unquestioned

When people died, the use of sedation often went unacknowledged publicly and unquestioned by investigators.

After Jackson’s death in Wisconsin, police press releases said nothing about ketamine. State police redacted mention of the drug from investigation records and blurred video of the prone restraint and injection, saying his family’s privacy outweighed the public interest in disclosure.

The fire department, which declined comment, blacked out the information in its incident report. But when AP uploaded the document, redactions disappeared, revealing Jackson was given 400 milligrams of ketamine.

An autopsy concluded Jackson died from complications caused by meth. The report said Jackson’s ketamine dose was 100 milligrams, a quarter of what the fire department report said.

Two longtime forensic pathologists who reviewed the case for AP said meth use wasn’t the only factor. Dr. Joye Carter said she believed the police altercation and ketamine caused the death, saying the sedative can cause heart problems when given to a meth user.

Dr. Victor Weedn said the level of meth in Jackson’s blood was high but generally not lethal. He said Jackson likely died from high blood acid levels, with police restraint and possibly ketamine contributing.

The autopsy was performed in Ramsey County, Minnesota. A county spokesperson defended the findings from a now-retired medical examiner, saying the discrepancy on the ketamine dose wasn’t significant.

Citing the autopsy’s finding that meth was the cause, Eau Claire County District Attorney Peter Rindal ruled Jackson’s case was not an “officer-involved death” under Wisconsin law and closed the investigation.

In nearly 90% of the deaths examined by AP, coroners and medical examiners did not list sedation as a cause or contributing factor. Some autopsy reports failed to document that the deceased had been sedated.

The most common ruling was an accidental death in which other drugs, often meth or cocaine, were causes or contributing factors. More than a quarter were at least partially attributed to excited delirium.

Medical examiners view sedatives as safe treatments to control patients and wouldn’t question their use unless there was a grievous error, said Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner of Connecticut and past president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.

“Generally we’re going to default then back to what’s the underlying disease or injury that started this chain of events,” Gill said.

He said sedatives rarely cause deaths by themselves but additional studies could look at whether they play a role in fatal police struggles where many factors are involved.

Even when autopsies implicated sedatives, investigations didn’t always follow.

In LaCour’s case, the coroner found she died from “respiratory arrest associated with acute alcohol and ketamine intoxication.” The district attorney’s office said it had no record of reviewing her death.

Nine miles from LaCour’s injection, a paramedic injected 26-year-old Hunter Barr with ketamine as officers held him facedown in the dirt outside his Colorado Springs home in September 2020.

Retired postal worker Mark Barr had called 911 for help controlling his son, who he said wasn’t violent but was having a bad reaction to LSD. He watched as a medic gave two injections just minutes apart. He said he couldn’t figure out why the second injection was necessary, saying his son was subdued. Hunter Barr became unconscious on the way to a hospital and died within hours.

The coroner ruled Barr died from the effects of ketamine. The Colorado Springs Police Department closed the case as “non-criminal” and the DA’s office again had no review.

When deaths were investigated, inquiries usually focused on whether police used excessive force. In audio and video reviewed by AP, investigators seemed uninterested in how sedation may have contributed.

“I’m not trying to get in the weeds with a whole bunch of that,” an investigator told a paramedic explaining the ketamine injection he gave 18-year-old Giovani Berne before Berne’s heart stopped in Palm Bay, Florida, in 2016.

Berne’s sister, Christina, said the family didn’t know he had been given ketamine until contacted by AP years later, but “we knew something bad happened in the ambulance.” A medical examiner ruled that Berne died of excited delirium.

The death of McClain, 23, in Colorado is the only one that resulted in charges against paramedics. Prosecutors argued Aurora paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec didn’t assess McClain, gave him too much ketamine for someone his size and didn’t monitor him afterward.

Their convictions shook the EMS field, whose leaders say treatment mistakes shouldn’t be criminalized. Defense attorneys argued the paramedics followed their training on excited delirium and ketamine. A judge gave Cichuniec five years in prison while Cooper was sentenced Friday to 14 months in jail and probation.

Civil liability is also rare, in part because deaths have multiple causes and some courts have ruled that unwilling injections aren’t excessive force even when they cause harm. That hasn’t stopped families from trying: A number of wrongful death lawsuits involving sedation are pending.

Lawmakers in Colorado banned excited delirium as a justification for using ketamine and put other restrictions on the drug, but changes in the law elsewhere have been few.

Paramedic reformers are working to address the failures that increase the risk of sedatives contributing to deaths.

Paramedic Eric Jaeger helped rewrite New Hampshire’s protocols and, at a fire station in Hooksett, recently used Jackson’s death as a training scenario after evaluating the case for AP. He questioned whether sedation was necessary. He said medics failed to thoroughly evaluate Jackson and should have had monitoring equipment ready before any injection.

He said he had been aware of a handful of deaths but the number found by AP “dramatically increases” the scope.

“If we don’t change the training, change the protocols, change the leadership to make the system safer,” Jaeger said, “then we all bear responsibility for future deaths.”

Never miss a beat: Get our daily stories straight to your inbox with theGrio’s newsletter.

34

Kehlani, the R&B sensation, whipped the internet into a frenzy with her most recent Instagram post.

The singer shared a video of herself performing the dance challenge for her song, ‘After Hours,’ which was created by Darius Hickman. The video rapidly went viral, receiving over 11 million views in a couple of hours.

The Bay Area singer performed the complicated choreography flawlessly in the video, demonstrating her amazing dance talents and undeniable personality. Her immaculate performance not only wowed onlookers but also prompted a rush of excitement and conjecture on social media.

Many social media fans were quick to share their excitement about Kehlani’s prospective collaboration with emerging talent Tyla.

Fans even claimed The South African artist’s influence could be noticed in Kehlani’s dance video. Comparisons between the two artists’ techniques were all over the comments section.

Tyla’s influence is insane https://t.co/VJreKDfSur

— Desmond. (@vincentdesmond_) April 27, 2024

tyla out here inspiring seasoned artists https://t.co/n9M6c9eNGp

— ☆ kash ☆ (@kashhaliwell) April 28, 2024

I love Kehlani but her new music video is biting of Tyla so hard like didn’t even try to hide it 😵‍💫

— 𝕟𝕒𝕟𝕔𝕪 ❁ (@callmefancyy) April 27, 2024

I need Kehlani to link up with Tyla & quick! https://t.co/nw83uHEYOy

— LEAD NEVER FOLLOW (@BOSTONSMACKV2) April 27, 2024

Are you excited about the possibility of a Kehlani and Tyla collaboration? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

About The Author

Related

---

Discover more from Where Is The Buzz | Breaking News, Entertainment, Exclusive Interviews & More

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.