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CINCINNATI (CN) – A grieving mother and three other relatives were in attendance Friday for a Sixth Circuit hearing regarding the death of Rodney Brown at the hands of Cleveland police in 2010.
Officers had pulled Rodney Brown over on New Year’s Eve 2010 for allegedly driving with the headlights off.
Brown’s family claims that officers asked 40-year-old Brown to get out of the vehicle, then elbowed him the back of his neck during a pat down.
They say Brown then ran across the street and turned to face the officers but did not threaten them in any way. Brown fled when an officer used a stun gun on him, and police say the man resisted violently as several officers tried to subdue him, repeatedly deploying their Tasers.
A police radio captured Brown repeatedly telling officers that he could not breathe as they carried him handcuffs to a squad car, to which one of the officers replied, “Who gives a fuck?”
Once he was in the police car, an officer noticed Brown’s pupils were fixed, and police eventually took him out of the vehicle and propped him up on the curb.
When Emergency Medical Services arrived at the scene, Brown was nonresponsive and in full cardiac arrest.
Shirley Brown filed suit over her son’s death in 2011.
The case is before the Sixth Circuit now as the officers appeal a federal judge’s refusal to grant them immunity on the claim that they were deliberately indifferent to Brown’s serious health condition.
Cleveland city attorney John Bacevice Jr. told a three-judge panel Friday that the lower court should not even have heard the deliberate-indifference claim because Brown’s mother failed to plead it in her complaint.
When Judge Karen Nelson Moore asked if Brown could amend her claims should the court reverse, Bavevice said, “That would be wholly unfair.”
“We’ve litigated this case for four years … and [amending the complaint] would basically give the plaintiffs a do-over,” the attorney argued.
