Dontae Maurice Melton Jr. died in the custody of Baltimore Police officers June 25 after he was restrained on the night of the 24th during a mental health crisis at the intersection of Franklin Street and Franklintown Road, where he asked a police officer for help.
The 31-year-old father of two suffered from mood disorders and a seizure disorder, his mother, Eleshiea Goode, told Baltimore Beat.
“His decision to start using drugs was his way of self-medicating as he tried to fight the battlefield in his mind that never seem to allow him to rest,” Goode wrote in a text message to the Beat. “He’s been to rehab around seven times in the past 10 years on his own ( he went when he was ‘ready’) because he never gave up on trying to beat the demons in his head.”
After a rehab stint in Crownsville, Melton remained sober for some time and began working at a medical waste plant in Curtis Bay. “He kept that job for almost a year and even bought himself a used truck and was extremely proud of himself as this was the first time he made significant progress managing his condition,” Goode said.
Melton and Goode were the subjects of a 2005 Baltimore Sun story about access to tutoring that opens with an almost bucolic sense of their family life in Edmondson Village. “It’s a cool spring evening in Edmondson Village, and children are playing outside Dontae Melton’s house in the still-strong daylight,” the story begins. “The 11-year-old boy, however, is in his family’s darkened living room, working by lamplight on a writing assignment under the supervision of a private tutor paid for by Baltimore’s public schools.”
Goode was in graduate school at the time studying to be a school counselor. “I have spent my life helping young people achieve success as a School Counselor in Baltimore City Public Schools rising to a specialist position leading school counselors in the district,” she says.
According to his mother, Melton graduated from Forest Park High School in 2011 and worked as a busboy at The Prime Rib. He later had trouble with the police as he struggled with his mental health, including an attempted murder charge, stemming, according to Goode, from an incident when he was jumped by three people and fired a gun into the air. The charge was later reduced to reckless endangerment.
Melton was the father of a 13-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter and remained active in their lives despite his struggles. Sometime around Mother’s Day this year, according to Goode, Melton lost his job at the medical waste plant, “but didn’t want to tell me until after Mother’s Day because he didn’t want to ruin my day. For probably the first time in a very long time, he got me and my mom gifts for Mother’s Day which is something he wasn’t able to do over the years due to his addiction.”
“For probably the first time in a very long time, he got me and my mom gifts for Mother’s Day which is something he wasn’t able to do over the years due to his addiction.”
Eleshiea Goode
After relapsing, Melton checked himself into a seven-day detox program in early June so he could attend a family function sober.
On June 12, Melton, his mother, his sister Kaila, and his children went to Main Event, where the family often celebrated special occasions with bowling and air hockey, for his daughter’s fifth grade graduation. “Dontae loved his kids and they loved him. He was also very close to sister and they were super competitive! Dontae did the best he could to show up for those he loved. He has a special relationship with my mom, and he helped to care for her when she was ill. He was certainly her favorite,” Goode says.
A few days later, he began to act erratically and finally left the house, saying he didn’t need anyone. His mother filed a protective order, which she was told would let police know he was suffering from mental health issues. As a licensed clinician, and Melton’s mother, Goode says she was in a position to know the signs of someone in need of assistance and filed an emergency petition the day before Melton died. “I told the court, ‘this time is different, my son is not himself and needs help,’” she recalls. The petition, she says, was denied.
On June 24, Melton sought assistance from a Baltimore police officer. According to the initial report of the Independent Investigations Division of the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland, “at approximately 9:40 p.m., an adult man, approached a Baltimore Police Department (BPD) officer who was stopped at a traffic light in a marked police cruiser at the intersection of West Franklin Street and North Franklintown Road.”
“I’ve got a gentleman pulling on my doors asking for help,” an officer said on dispatch audio. “But he doesn’t look like he needs help.”
Later, an officer said he “thinks somebody’s chasing him, but nobody’s chasing him.”
“While the officer was speaking to the man, the man walked into the middle of the roadway several times. The officer attempted to restrain the man for the man’s own safety, and when other BPD officers arrived on scene, officers placed the man in handcuffs and leg restraints,” the preliminary IID report continues.
The report does not say whether the officers used violence to perform this restraint. At one point an officer radioed that “he’s very irate right now. They have leg shackles on him and handcuffs already.”
Melton was noted as unconscious at 10:15 p.m. but was not transported to the hospital until 10:30 p.m., 50 minutes after Melton first approached an officer seeking help. It is unclear from dispatch audio and the initial investigation what happened during the intervening period, but problems with the Computer Aided Dispatch system that emergency personnel use to communicate with each other seemed to have prevented a medic from arriving.
The IID, which now investigates such incidents, promises to release body camera footage and the names of the involved officers. Neither the officers nor Melton have been officially named. An employee of the Crown gas station at the intersection said police officers came and took the footage from the security cameras. The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions involving their investigation by press time but confirmed they are looking into who took the video footage.
Melton is one of three people to die in encounters with police in less than two weeks. Both Bilal Abdullah, a beloved arabber, and Pytorcarcha Brooks, a 70-year-old woman, were shot and killed by police officers.
City Council President Zeke Cohen has called for a hearing to examine the city’s crisis response system in response to the deaths. The city has one single crisis response team, and it’s unclear if the officers involved in Melton, Abdullah, or Brooks’ case were trained in crisis intervention. BPD has not responded to questions about whether the crisis response team was called or whether any of the officers in Melton’s case had received crisis response training.
The city has one single crisis response team, and it’s unclear if the officers involved in Melton, Abdullah, or Brooks’ case were trained in crisis intervention.
Melton’s case, where he died while in restraint, bears a resemblance to the case of Tyrone West, who died while being violently restrained by police in 2013. West’s death was ruled “undetermined” for years until an audit of the state medical examiner’s office revealed this May that his death was among three dozen cases involving restraint-related deaths that were incorrectly categorized as undetermined instead of homicides due to pro-police, anti-Black bias within the office.
West’s sister, Tawanda Jones, says that the police promised transparency. But even before the autopsy was performed, on their first visit with the family, police were already laying the groundwork for explanations other than murder. “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.
Jones had just taken her brother for a physical and didn’t believe the medical examiner’s explanation that ultimately attributed her brother’s death to a heart condition and the heat. Jones has held “West Wednesday” protests for her brother every week since July 18, 2013, when he was killed, and refused a million dollar settlement so she could continue to speak freely about the case. Six hundred and sixteen weeks later, she was finally vindicated by the audit, which began in 2021 after former Maryland Chief Medical Examiner David 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.
“As horrible as my brother’s murder was, the cover up was far worse,” Jones says of the lack of transparency and attempts to blame her brother for his own murder.
Goode, Melton’s mother, feels a similar lack of transparency when dealing with officials from the police department and the OAG. “They kept saying they didn’t know if the person deceased was my son, yet they were at my door,” she says. “They said they didn’t know what time he got to the hospital, but said he died ‘a couple hours after arrival.’ They transferred my son to the Medical Examiner’s office as a John Doe yet he told the police officer his name when he asked for help.”
“This is a nightmare,” Goode says, lamenting “a system that is not set up for people like my son to succeed.”
“I have signed graduation transcripts for literally hundreds of Baltimore City school kids and continued to help them navigate life with many of the same challenges as my son,” she says. “It was hard knowing that I could help everyone else’s child, but not my own.”