ATLANTA — A Georgia woman is sharing her painful tie to the George Floyd case in Minneapolis. Angela Smith said it's a tie that should have prevented police from kneeling on Floyd and prevented another family from losing a loved-one.
Her little brother, David Smith, had dreams as big as his smile. At 28 years old, the fun-loving, poetry-writing didn't let his bipolar disorder define him.
"He was amazing, and he meant so much to us,” Angela said.
But on Sept. 17, 2010, his promise ended inside a YMCA in Minneapolis. Staff there called police because they thought David was acting odd.
The man, who had a mental illness, had committed no crime. But video from the incident shows officers handcuffed him and knelt on his back for about four minutes.
According to the autopsy report, David died from "mechanical asphyxia" caused by prone restraint. The city paid $3 million in a settlement with his family and promised to properly train its officer on restraining suspects.
“Nothing that they could do would bring him back to us, and we understood that,” she said. “So, we wanted to make sure that no one else died the same way that he died.”
But in May, while the world watched in horror as George Floyd died with an officer kneeling on his neck for several minutes, Angela Smith was also watching and thinking -- not again.
“When we saw George Floyd die, and we saw him cry out for his mom in his last moments of his life and saw people in the video standing by and nobody did anything to stop it – my heart broke," she explained.
"It's like my brother died all over again,” she said through tears. “I felt like, how could this same thing happen again, when we did everything possible to make sure that it didn't?”
Prone restraint deaths happen when police officers pin suspects face down with weight on their backs. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned against it since the mid-90s, telling officers in an instructional video, "as soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach."
A 2003 training video from the New York Police Department also shows that for decades, law enforcement circles have known about the risk of kneeling on a suspect’s back.
“Occasionally there are fatalities,” an instructor in the video is heard saying. A “person on their stomach can't breathe with pressure applied to their backs, as soon as suspects are handcuffed get them off their stomachs, turn them on their side.”
But 10 years after David Smith’s death, George Floyd died in a similar way.
In a statement to 11Alive's sister-station KARE 11, the Minneapolis police chief said, in part, "I can confirm that MPD fulfilled the training requirement” and that it was "given to all officers."
He goes on to say, the officers in the George Floyd case “knew what was happening—one intentionally caused it and the others failed to prevent it. This was murder. It wasn't a lack of training."
Jeff Storm, who represents the Smith family, is now also working to get justice for the George Floyd family.
“It's one thing to have paperwork that says you did training and it's another thing to ensure that the training is adequate, that your officers are doing it and paying attention and making sure that your officers are actually living the training,” he said.
“Seeing that these things continue to happen, whether it's in Minneapolis or around the country, when they thought they fought really hard to make a difference and make sure that law enforcement, to the extent they didn't understand that already, knew that people die when you do this," Storm said. "It's been a very difficult time for this family to have these wounds reopened.”
Angela Smith believes her brother’s case could play an important role in the George Floyd case once it goes to court. All four police officers involved in the Floyd case were fired and are now facing charges.
“If they enforced what they said they would do, he would not be dead. The world would not be grieving the way that we are,” Smith added.
OTHER HEADLINES