After “fighting for months” for access to the footage, the family of a Black man who died after being tased by an Alabama police officer in July was finally able to view body camera video from the incident Wednesday.
“This is one of the worst videos of a police killing that I have ever witnessed,” family attorney Harry Daniels told reporters at a news conference following the viewing. “And I’ll put it right up there with George Floyd – other cases across the nation.”
Last week, a grand jury declined to indict the two police officers who struggled with Dallas before his death, WPMI reported.
The case come as police use of force, especially against people of color, remains a critical issue nationwide more than three years after Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis officer.
Jawan Dallas, 36, died after Mobile police officers responded to a report of a residential burglary in progress at a mobile home park, authorities said. Officers found two men at the scene. As they were trying to identify one of them he tried to flee, police said in a July 4 news release.
The man, identified as Dallas, “physically resisted” when officers tried to apprehend him, police said.
The video has not been released publicly.
Describing what he saw on the video, Daniels said Dallas’ altercation with police began when two officers investigating the burglary call, which he described as “a trespass at best,” encountered Dallas and another man.
The situation then escalated when officers asked Dallas and the man with him for identification and Dallas claimed they had done nothing illegal, Daniels said.
Police asked Dallas to step out of his vehicle and he complied, then attempted to run away, the attorney said. Dallas was tackled to the ground and what “sounded like some kind of struggle ensued.”
Dallas “was struck multiple times by officers” and the taser could be heard, Daniels said. “We heard almost 13 (Taser) cycles. Now we don’t know if those cycles actually struck his body. But we know it was 13 times, we know he was begging for his life, telling the officers ‘I cannot breathe, help me …’ At one point he even said, ‘I don’t want to be George Floyd.’”
Medical personnel were called to the scene to evaluate Dallas, who was taken to a local hospital, where he was later pronounced dead, police said.
Phil Williams, Jawan Dallas’ father, called Wednesday “one of the worst days of my life. I seen my son actually die, suffer, plead for his life. His mom is destroyed. Not just today, ever since July 2 when we got the news of our son being murdered. Mobile Police Department you straight murdered my son.”
“You held him there, you pound on him … You dry stunned him, you stunned him 13 to 15 times,” Williams said. “Yeah, of course he had a heart attack because you all caused and triggered a heart attack.”
Emergency medical personnel administered aid to Dallas at the scene however, “He never regained consciousness,” Daniels said. “Based on the video from what we saw, he died right there on the scene.”
Dallas had injuries consistent with Taser applications and some blunt force trauma injuries to his back, according to a copy of an autopsy from the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences posted by CNN affiliate WPMI.
Dallas’ cause of death was listed as cardiorespiratory failure due to acute myocardial ischemia and methamphetamine toxicity, the report said. The manner of death is listed as an accident.
The names of the officers have not been publicly released.
Daniels said he hoped the video would one day be released to the public but cautioned, “if you ever see it, you’ll never forget it.”
CNN’s Olivia LaBorde contributed to this report.