“My world ended on July 18, 2013,” says Tawanda Jones, of the night that police officers killed her brother near Morgan State University in Northeast Baltimore. Her brother, Tyrone West, had eaten dinner with Jones that night and borrowed her car. Within a couple hours, Jones recalls, she was overwhelmed by a feeling that something was wrong with him. “I got all this pain, overwhelming pain, that leads up to the time when my brother was getting murdered, like my neck, my back, it felt like somebody broke my neck. I’m in there screaming,” she says.
Her family tried to calm her down as she made frantic phone calls trying to find West. Eventually, her then-fiance walked in the room and told her, “You were right, Tawanda. Someone killed your brother.”
Though police beat West that night, the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the cause of death was not homicide, but “undetermined” and resulting from a heart condition, which Jones maintains her brother did not suffer from.
In the 616 weeks since, during which she has protested the killing of her brother, she has tried to get people in power to listen to her family’s story and rule his death a homicide, as he was, as she puts it “beat worse than Rodney King.”
Finally, on May 15, Governor Wes Moore and Attorney General Anthony Brown announced that an independent audit of OCME found three dozen deaths in police custody that should have been ruled homicides during the nearly 20-year tenure of Dr. David Fowler — including that of Jones’ brother, West. (See our previous reporting on the audit here)
“I literally cried out like a baby today,” Jones told Baltimore Beat. “To see my brother’s name included, and just to know that for a whole entire decade, I’ve been fighting and literally taking my soul out of my body, being my brother’s keeper, and trying to convey the message that my brother was, you know, brutally murdered.”
“To see my brother’s name included, and just to know that for a whole entire decade, I’ve been fighting and literally taking my soul out of my body, being my brother’s keeper, and trying to convey the message that my brother was, you know, brutally murdered.”
Tawanda Jones
On July 18, 2013, Baltimore Police officers claimed that West and a passenger were acting suspicious in the vehicle he was driving. Officers Jorge Bernardez-Ruiz and Nicholas Chapman claimed that when they noticed a bulge in his sock, West charged Chapman, trying to poke him in the eye. Witnesses said the officers pulled West from the car by his hair and with more than a dozen other officers present “started beating him and Maced him, he got up and called for help and the cops knocked him over and beat him to death, then tried to bring him back.”
Jones says that neither she nor anyone else in her family was notified. “Why didn’t nobody call me? Like he had my car. They could have called me,” Jones says. When detectives and a police colonel showed up at the house the next day, “they’re doing, like, an investigation on my whole damn family,” Jones says. “And I’m like, why are you asking? Like, we should be asking you guys questions: What happened to my brother?”
Jones says that the police promised transparency and said the autopsy would be performed that afternoon. But even before the autopsy was performed, on that first visit with the family, police were already laying the groundwork for explanations other than murder. “And they said… ‘We want to make sure that there weren’t other contributing factors of Mr. West’s death, that he wasn’t suffering from the heat, you know, because it was really hot yesterday,’” Jones recalls. “And then [the Colonel] said, ‘We want to make sure Mr. West didn’t have a bad heart or anything like that.’”
Jones told them she had just taken her brother for a physical and that his heart was fine, but, despite the promises that there would be an autopsy that day, OCME did not release West’s body to the family for five days. “Even the funeral home called us and said, ‘Look, we never heard of such a thing,’” West recalls.
OCME did not release a post-mortem examination report to the family until December 11, 2013. But when they did, it echoed the theory floated by police that first day, declaring “this 44 year old man, Tyrone West, died of Cardiac Arrhythmia due to Cardiac Conduction System Abnormality complicated by Dehydration during Police Restraint.”
Rather than ruling the death a homicide, OCME ruled the cause of death as undetermined. “And then that’s when [then-State’s Attorney] Gregg Bernstein came in and he said … he was basing his information off the findings from the medical examiner’s office,” Jones recalls. “So if the medical record would have said so, my brother’s case would have been treated like a homicide.”
Jones did not accept the ruling and, after a tissue analysis contradicted the autopsy, she had her brother’s body exhumed for an independent autopsy, performed by a board-certified pathologist who ruled in 2016 that West died from asphyxiation while being restrained by police. In 2017, Jones refused a $1 million settlement, because it would have prevented her from continuing to fight for the truth about her brother’s death to come out.
Finally, after nearly 12 years, the independent audit, released last week ruled that OCME’s determination was faulty and the death should have been ruled a homicide.
The audit began in 2021 after Fowler testified for the defense during the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and said that the death of George Floyd should have been classified as having an “undetermined” cause. Video of Floyd’s arrest showed Chauvin pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, and Chauvin was ultimately convicted of murder.
More than 450 medical experts signed a letter to then-Attorney General Brian Frosh calling for an independent review of OCME’s practices during Fowler’s tenure leading the office from 2003 until 2019.
The audit team selected 87 cases to review out of more than 1,300 in-custody deaths investigated by OCME during that period and hired 12 independent forensic pathologists to examine the cases. Three reviewers were assigned to independently review each case and make their own determinations of the manner of death. In 36 cases, all three reviewers agreed the death should have been ruled a homicide. In another five cases, two out of the three reviewers found the manner of death should have been homicide.
“This audit is incredibly troubling, but sadly confirms what we have seen for years — that the OCME holds deep-seated biases that favor the police and mirror the racial disparities that pervade the entire criminal legal system,” Maryland Deputy Public Defender Keith Lotridge said in a statement to the Beat regarding the audit findings. “The families of the victims have suffered for years while enduring the blaming and smearing of their loved ones.”
“This audit is incredibly troubling, but sadly confirms what we have seen for years — that the OCME holds deep-seated biases that favor the police and mirror the racial disparities that pervade the entire criminal legal system.”
Maryland Deputy Public Defender Keith Lotridge
“As horrible as my brother’s murder was, the cover up was far worse,” Jones says. “So when you have people from the medical examiner’s office lying — they do the final examination of your loved one, and they come back being biased, like that — that’s ridiculous.”
Still, by focusing on a limited number of cases, primarily those in which the death bore some resemblance to that of Floyd’s, the audit may have only scratched the surface of problems with Fowler’s OCME, as reporting by The Appeal has shown, with their own investigation into in-custody deaths that were labeled by the office as “natural” or “suicide.” Jones has previously called on the state to examine all 1,313 in-custody deaths in the OCME database.
The report’s findings do not automatically mean there will be criminal charges or that police will face discipline. Instead, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office plans to review with each jurisidiction’s state’s attorney’s office all of the cases that reviewers say should have been identified as homicides.
That is further complicated in West’s case, where Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates and Maryland AG Brown have been arguing since 2023 not whether West’s case should be examined, but who should do it. After a new law giving the Attorney General’s office the power to investigate police-involved deaths, Bates called on Brown to take on the case, claiming that his own office had a conflict of interest that prevented him from pursuing it.
“If you’d like, we can also assist in creating or vetting a deconfliction policy to address the potential conflict that you believe might prevent you from investigating the death of Mr. West, and any future potential conflicts that routinely may arise in an office of your size,” Brown responded in a letter to Bates. The conflict involves an assistant state’s attorney who is married to Bernardez-Ruiz, one of the police officers who killed West.
“Right now, I want the AG’s office to bring their special prosecutors out and secure criminal charges” against the officers, Jones says.
“While the Office of the Attorney General did brief prosecutorial offices as to aspects on the forthcoming report, neither the report itself nor the full details of its findings, methodologies, or conclusions were shared with Maryland’s State’s Attorneys in advance of its public release,” Richard Gibson, the president of the Maryland State’s Attorneys Association said in a statement. “As such, at this time, we are not in a position to support or oppose the analysis or conclusions contained within the document until we conduct our own independent due diligence.”
“The Office of the Attorney General intends to fulfill its obligations under the Governor’s Executive Order, which includes reviewing the 41 cases, in consultation with the respective State’s Attorney, and determining whether any additional action is appropriate,” Kelsey Hartman, an OAG spokesperson said.
The Baltimore City SAO has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
“This report will be meaningless if multiple steps are not taken,” says deputy public defender Lotridge. “First, the families of the victims need to be provided with avenues of relief. The officers involved in these homicides also need to be investigated and held accountable, with a full review of all of their work.”
In 2016, Bernardez-Ruiz and Chapman, two of the officers involved in West’s death, were found guilty in a civil case brought by Abdul Salaam, a youth counselor who Bernardez-Ruiz and Chapman stopped and severely beat in an alley while his child was in the car and his neighbors watched. Salaam was awarded $70,000 by a jury.
Nine officers involved in West’s death, including one from Morgan State University’s private force, were initially suspended while an internal investigation was conducted. No charges were brought against any of the officers, and Bernardez-Ruiz was promoted to the rank of sergeant in 2020.
“The Baltimore Police Department is aware of the recent audit findings. We are committed to full transparency and we will fully cooperate with the State in its ongoing investigation and findings,” BPD spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge wrote in a statement.
“I always knew that these weren’t isolated incidents,” says Jones, who has long sought to bring light to other cases of police brutality in Baltimore, including Anthony Anderson, Freddie Gray, and others.
In 2005, years before Gray’s death in a police vehicle “rough ride” sparked the Baltimore Uprising, a plumber named Dondi Johnson was arrested for public urination and thrown into the back of a police van. He died two weeks later from injuries he sustained during a “rough ride.” OCME ruled the death an accident. The audit deemed it should have been a homicide. Nicole Leake, the driver of the van, appeared in an “I am BPD” promotional video in 2015.
The report does not address controversial cases, where the issue is something other than OCME’s determination of the cause of death, such as that of Donnell Rochester, who was shot and killed by Officer Connor Murray on February 19, 2022. In that case, the SAO, under Marilyn Mosby, investigated the killing and decided not to bring charges. But instead of releasing their findings, that administration left them for her successor Bates, who followed Mosby’s recommendation and did not charge the officers. However, in a separate report, the Attorney General’s office ruled that there was probable cause to bring charges. But, because the case occurred prior to the 2023 law allowing the OAG to investigate police deaths, Brown’s office argued there is nothing it can do. Danielle Brown, Rochester’s mother, has been urging Governor Moore to “order the Maryland Attorney General to prosecute those involved in the killing of Donnell.”
Governor Moore’s executive order regarding the crisis at OCME empowers the OAG to investigate deaths such as West’s, even if they occurred before the responsibility of such investigations was transferred to their office. So, the audit report opens the possibility of prosecutions for the officers involved in the deaths of dozens of people in the city and throughout the state.
“I’ve been standing 10 toes down and I’m gonna keep pushing it ‘til I bring it home, and home for me is securing criminal charges for what they did…They said they based their findings on what the medical examiner’s office lied about,” says Jones. “Let’s base it on the truth, and let’s get some criminal charges.”
Madeleine O’Neill contributed reporting.