Two mentally impaired men died in Suffolk police custody.

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CarlM
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26 Dec 2022, 9:40 am

Two mentally impaired men died in Suffolk police custody. Investigations protected the officers.

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Police and prosecutors conducted flawed homicide probes in the deaths of Daniel McDonnell and Dainell Simmons, Newsday found.

Daniel McDonnell, 40, had bipolar disorder and died in a precinct building. Dainell Simmons, 29, who was severely autistic, died at a group home. The Suffolk County Police Department and District Attorney’s Office conducted flawed homicide investigations into the deaths of two mentally impaired men after struggles with police, avoiding full examinations of whether officers had committed crimes or violated department rules, a Newsday investigation has found.
Daniel McDonnell, a 40-year-old carpenter, suffered from bipolar disorder. He died inside the First Precinct building in West Babylon in 2011. Dainell Simmons, who was 29 and severely autistic, died two years later inside a Middle Island group home.
McDonnell and Simmons stopped breathing after officers provoked confrontations and then fought to restrain each man for transportation to hospitals. Officers pressed them to the floor in prone or partly prone positions that carried a high risk of suffocation.
Emergency medical technicians told homicide detectives that they found McDonnell lifeless on the precinct floor, facedown. Two saw his hands cuffed behind his back with a so-called spit hood over his head. Three police supervisors reported that officers had rolled McDonnell onto his side into a position that made it easier for him to breathe, as protocols required.
Handcuffed behind his back, Simmons, who was nonverbal, thrashed and screamed wordlessly for an estimated nine minutes under the weight of at least three officers at any one moment, until he suddenly fell limp and went silent, as if a light switch had been turned off, one officer testified in a civil lawsuit deposition.
A decade later, emotional scarring remains fresh for the loved ones of McDonnell and Simmons. Although they don’t know each other and didn’t know what happened in each other’s case, McDonnell’s widow and Simmons’ mother share anger that no one was held personally accountable for the deaths.
“No one was punished. No one was demoted. No one was even suspended for a week. Nothing happened. No one was told to go and take a class on how to deal with mentally ill people. Nothing, nothing happened,” Danielle McDonnell said, adding, “Of course, it sticks with the whole family that there was never any real justice.”
Glynice Simmons recalled the protests that swept America after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. A police officer had killed Floyd by pressing a knee on his neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed facedown on the street.
“With all the civil unrest, I think about how Dainell died, and that it’s still going on. Nothing has changed. Police are not being held accountable for what they are doing,” Glynice Simmons said.
The law empowers police to use force, including deadly force, in the line of duty. At the same time, the law requires police to use force properly. In New York, officers can be prosecuted if they are grossly negligent or reckless when they use force and kill someone.
Lawyers representing the McDonnell and Simmons families alleged in separate lawsuits that Suffolk police officers had wrongfully killed each man. The county paid $2.25 million in 2014 to settle the McDonnell case and $1.85 million in 2018 to end Simmons’ litigation.
To understand why Suffolk County spent more than $4 million to settle cases where no officers were charged with crimes or subjected to departmental discipline, Newsday’s Inside Internal Affairs project reviewed more than 5,000 pages of sworn testimony.
Questioned by lawyers for the McDonnell and Simmons families, police officers, supervisors and detectives described their roles in the events that led to the two deaths, as well as what happened in the homicide investigations that followed. Medical examiners and emergency medical personnel also testified.
Newsday presented key elements of the testimony to 19 former law enforcement officers, prosecutors and medical professionals who have expertise in topics including how police should engage with mentally impaired people, use force to subdue people and conduct homicide investigations. They have held positions ranging from New York Police Department lieutenant commander to sheriff of Ada County, Idaho, and vice chairman of the National Institute of Corrections, which establishes best practices for jails and prisons.
The former law enforcement officials reviewed how Suffolk police interacted with McDonnell or Simmons, how Suffolk homicide detectives investigated the deaths and how the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office responded. They then provided comments limited to specific areas of expertise, qualifying that they based judgments solely on the information provided by Newsday.
Many concluded that officers had unnecessarily and quickly used force against McDonnell and Simmons at times when the two men represented no threat to them, and that the officers had escalated the force after McDonnell and Simmons resisted.
“Both of these people were calm and non-combative until the police got involved,” said Fred Klein, a Hofstra University Law School professor and former chief of the Major Offenses Bureau of the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office. He cited McDonnell’s cooperative state before he was denied medication for his illness and Simmons sitting in a chair at an officer’s request before they discussed handcuffing him: “It’s probably what caused both of these men to die, eventually — that the police provoked it.”
Many also said the deaths demonstrated that police have been poorly trained to engage with people who are mentally ill or disabled. They pointed out that officers failed to speak calmly and patiently to McDonnell and Simmons as recommended by mental health professionals.
“Anytime you see the police involved [in psychiatric transports] there’s a risk that they’re going to go back into the ‘warrior’ policing or ‘command-and-control’ model that they use in responding more broadly to those labeled criminal threats,” said Jamelia Morgan, a Northwestern University Law School professor who has studied disability and policing. “It’s just not fitting.”
Morgan advocated for dispatching mental health professionals to many noncriminal calls involving mentally impaired people and urged a “more therapeutic model of policing” that would approach individuals with disabilities as people needing assistance.
The former prosecutors, police commanders and law enforcement officers who discussed the two deaths with Newsday described the investigations conducted by SCPD homicide detectives as “shoddy,” “sloppy,” “cursory” and “a sham.”
They cited, for example, that a homicide detective’s interviews with 10 of the officers who struggled with McDonnell lasted from two to five minutes each, according to the detective’s notes, and that the detective sergeant investigating Simmons’ death didn’t attempt to estimate how long officers laid on top of the man after he was handcuffed.
These experts noted that the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, then led by Thomas Spota, failed to conduct a grand jury investigation into McDonnell’s death, and they saw evidence that a grand jury investigation into Simmons’ death was designed to avoid charging police.
“In both cases, it was clear that the intent was to protect the officers involved, and that, to me, subverts justice,” said Melba Pearson, who served for 16 years as a prosecutor in Miami-Dade County, Florida. She handled homicide investigations, including killings by police, and is now a Florida International University criminal justice professor and director of prosecution projects for its Gordon Institute for Public Policy.
“The big commonality is you’ve got the police investigating themselves, and I think both of these situations are prime examples about why that’s not a best practice,” Klein said.
Newsday attempted to reach members of the police department who participated in the events leading up to the deaths of McDonnell and Simmons, as well as to contact detectives — one has since died — and a prosecutor who conducted investigations. Other than the Simmons prosecutor, who cited grand jury secrecy laws in declining to comment on the majority of Newsday’s findings relevant to his role, calls and emails were not returned.
Additionally, Newsday explained its findings and the opinions of the experts in 28 letters sent to all the individuals by FedEx. The letters invited each individual to speak with Newsday about the information.
Newsday also sought comment about the findings through the presidents of the county’s three police unions — the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association, Detectives Association and Superior Officers Association — and offered each the opportunity to speak on behalf of members, retirees or their unions at large.
They did not respond.
Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison, who took command of the SCPD at the start of the year, additionally did not respond to requests for comment.
Spokeswoman Dawn Schob said that in 2016 the department updated its protocols for removing a prisoner from a cell and that in 2019 it adopted a 40-hour, post-academy curriculum, called Crisis Intervention Training, that instructs officers in techniques they can use to prevent encounters with mentally impaired people from escalating into the use of force.
Spota didn’t respond to requests for comment made through his criminal defense attorney. He is serving a five-year federal prison sentence after his conviction on corruption charges.
State law now gives the New York Attorney General’s Office jurisdiction over investigating and prosecuting all police-involved deaths. Ray Tierney, the current Suffolk district attorney, said in a statement that the statute of limitations has expired on any potential charges against anyone involved in the McDonnell and Simmons cases. He declined to comment on the decisions of past administrations.
For nearly a half-century, police disciplinary files in New York were sealed by law. In 2020, after Floyd’s murder, state legislators and then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo repealed the law, known as “50-a,” that had imposed near-total secrecy on police disciplinary files.


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