Hundreds of people are killed by police in the US each year, and much attention has been paid recently to the high proportion that are black. But there’s another disturbing trend that is rarely discussed.
It was shortly after 05:00 when three West Milwaukee police officers broke into the home of 22-year-old Adam Trammell to find him naked and bewildered, standing in his bathtub as water from the shower ran down his body.
Adam, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was having some form of breakdown. A neighbour had called 911 to report that she had seen him naked in the corridor, talking about the devil. She thought Adam’s name was Brandon, and told police this when they arrived at the building.
According to his father, Larry Trammell, Adam often had delusions and hallucinations. He would take showers to help him calm down when he felt anxious.
Adam was not armed and he did not appear to behave in a threatening manner. But he did not leave the shower as the police commanded.
The officers then fired their Tasers at him 15 times, administering long, painful electric shocks as he screamed and writhed in the bathtub.
Then more officers arrived, and after dragging him, still naked, from his apartment, they held him down and he was injected with sedatives – midazolam at first, and then ketamine.
Moments later, Adam stopped breathing. He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead soon after arrival. The date was 25 May 2017.
We know this is how events unfolded because the incident was caught on cameras worn by the officers.
“I could barely stand to watch it,” Adam’s mother Kathleen says of the footage. “He was being brutally tortured and screaming out in agony and I could feel the pain, almost. It was like a nightmare with my son as the victim.”
Kathleen is at a loss to explain why the police behaved the way they did.
“He was just in his own place, he was not out on the streets, he didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t even have any clothes on, in his own shower. Where was the imminent danger? There was none. He didn’t deserve it at all,” she tells me, wiping tears from her eyes.
Larry thinks his son may have believed the police were a hallucination. The officers who found him in the bathroom addressed him as “Brandon”, not “Adam”, because this was the name they were given by the neighbour. “By them calling him by a different name, he was thinking, ‘This ain’t real,'” says Larry.
At one point Adam splashed water at the officers, something Larry says he might have done as a test to find out whether they really existed.
Even the police acknowledge Adam had not committed a crime and was not suspected of committing one. So why did it happen?
The police say they broke into the apartment solely to help Adam. They say they acted the way they did to restrain him and get him medical care. In spite of the footage, Milwaukee’s District Attorney John Chisholm went so far as to rule that “there was no basis to conclusively link Mr Trammell’s death to the actions taken by the police officers”. No officers were prosecuted.
There was no national media attention and there were no riots or protest marches. Almost unnoticed, Adam became part of a disturbing statistic that is rarely talked about – the high proportion of disabled people among the hundreds who die after interactions with US police each year.
Conservative estimates suggest that about a quarter of those who die in these interactions have a disability – whether mental, intellectual or physical. But other research indicates that the proportion may be far greater.
Already in 2018, across the US, at least 136 people with a disability are known to have been killed by police officers, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post and analysis of local media reports.
In many countries the police would be the last resort when people are going through mental health crises but in the US, they are often the first to respond because of the lack of more specialised agencies.
And when I began to look at these interactions between police and disabled people in different parts of the country, clear patterns began to emerge. Adam’s story may be extreme, but some aspects of it are repeated time and time again.
Ethan Saylor, 26, had Down’s syndrome. On the evening of 12 January 2013, in Frederick County, Maryland, he was at the cinema with his carer, watching the film Zero Dark Thirty.
He was fascinated by its CIA characters and applauded the end of the movie, insisting he did not want to go home. Instead, he wanted to see the film again.
Ethan and his carer left the auditorium but he refused to leave the building. His carer went to bring her car around, hoping this would persuade him, but Ethan went back into the cinema to the same seat in which he’d watched the film.
In the carer’s absence, three off-duty police officers who were working as security staff in their spare time heard someone was in the cinema without a ticket for the next showing.
“At some point it becomes, ‘You need to leave or you are going to be arrested,'” says Ethan’s mother, Patti, who sat through the evidence given in a subsequent investigation.
Ethan apparently told the officers he was a CIA agent and was not going anywhere. “So the officers put their arms under his arms to lift him up and remove him from the theatre,” says Patti.
Ethan, crying out for his mother, was restrained and handcuffed.
