Family demands justice after no indictment for NC deputies in death of Black man
The family of a Black man killed while in the custody of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office is speaking out after a grand jury chose not to indict the five deputies charged in his death.
John Neville, 56, died on Dec. 4, 2019, after deputies at the jail held him on his stomach with his arms behind his back and his legs raised to his wrists — a controversial position that is known to cause breathing trouble and death.
“It is shameful that another Black life has been extinguished at the hands of law enforcement and yet still, there is no accountability and no justice,” his son, Sean Neville, said in a written statement issued Tuesday. “We will continue to fight for what is right and just.”
John Neville’s death happened just months before George Floyd died in Minneapolis. Both were held in prone position. And like Floyd, Neville told officers he couldn’t breathe.
He told them no less than 30 times.
A medical examiner’s report confirmed Neville being restrained in prone position caused positional and compressional asphyxiation that led to a heart attack and brain injury.
Sean Neville called it “disheartening that the videos of our father gasping for air and begging for mercy while he was bound and suffocated do not seem to have gained any purchase with Forsyth County or Wellpath Care.”
Last July, Neville’s estate attorney, Mike Grace, expressed frustration that the case had all but stalled. He said then that that the family deserved more.
“You know the squeaky wheel gets rewarded,” Grace said. “The squeaky wheel all over the country in cases similar to this, and in cases not nearly as egregious as this case, got rewarded. And these folks who did not choose to make this a battle of good versus evil or Black versus white or any other struggles we’ve had, they got nothing.”
Grand jury
Taking the charges before the grand jury is the first major move in the case since Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill charged the deputies in 2020.
The grand jury returned an indictment against Michelle Heughins, a nurse working for Wellpath, a medical company that contracted with the jail.
Sean Neville credited O’Neill for his work on the case and taking it this far.
O’Neill said Tuesday he wasn’t sure where the case will go from here. O’Neill has the ability to have the investigators go back before the grand jury. He had called on the State Bureau of Investigation to investigate the case following Neville’s death.
“We need to get with the family and the investigators and the people that are truly as invested in this case as we are and make a collective decision about what is the best way to pursue justice in this case,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill is up for reelection in 2022.
Video footage
Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough did not tell the public about Neville’s death until after The News & Observer asked a judge to release body camera footage of the events at the jail that led up to Neville’s death.
The judge granted the release of some of the videos to a coalition of media outlets that later joined The N&O’s petition.
The video footage showed deputies responding to Neville’s jail cell. It is believed that Neville fell out of his bunk while having a seizure and woke his cellmate who called on deputies to help. Neville became incoherent and combative with deputies as he regained consciousness.
Eventually, deputies placed Neville in prone position and left him that way for more than 11 minutes even as he begged for his life.
“You’re breathing, because you’re talking and you’re yelling and you’re moving,” a deputy tells him, as he struggles. “You need to stop. You need to relax. Quit resisting us. The quicker you relax the quicker we will be out of here, man.”
As Neville pleads with officers to help him they try to remove his handcuffs but end up breaking a key and a pair of bolt cutters before finally removing the handcuffs.
In the video, Heughins is seen checking on Neville before leaving the jail cell and looking at him through the window of the cell. She tells deputies she’s not sure that he’s breathing. They go back in to see.
Neville became comatose and died two days later at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
“As our family continues to watch our father’s violent death replayed before a national audience, we remain hopeful that some court will acknowledge the wrongdoing that led to this atrocity,” Sean Neville said.
Public records
The N&O filed other requests for records from the N.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner regarding Neville’s death, which includes the SBI files.
O’Neill went to a judge without telling The N&O and had those records sealed. The judge later determined that the records were public and that O’Neill and the court did not have standing to bring the case forward.
O’Neill is currently appealing the judge’s decision.
A similar case has been filed by The N&O and the coalition of media outlets against the state Department of Health and Human Services. That case remains ongoing.
This story was originally published April 5, 2022 at 6:00 PM.