On the morning of Feb. 5, 60-year-old Lisa Edwards was arrested when she refused to leave the Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville after being discharged.
Instead, Edwards ended up in the back of a police car, then officers began to transfer her to the jail. On the way, she becomes unresponsive, so the officer drove her back to the hospital, where she was readmitted. The next day, Edwards died from a stroke.
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The Knoxville Police Department has since released the body camera footage of their interaction with Edwards, where footage shows officers attempting to load Edwards — who was sitting in a wheelchair when they arrived — into a police van.
“Please, don’t let me fall,” Edwards says as two officers lift her from the wheelchair.
They ask her to step into the van, but she says she can’t. They try numerous times to get her to go into the van and Edwards asks for her inhaler. Around the 25-minute mark of the footage, Edwards is on the ground outside of the van.
“I can’t pick her up ‘cause she’s dead weight,” one officer says.
“It’s all an act,” another officer says.
“That act’s going to turn into a problem,” an officer says.
“She’s saying she can’t breathe,” one officer says to another. “If she falls over either way and she can’t breathe, if she dies, that’s on me. I’m not willing to take that risk.”
As Edwards is on the ground outside of the van, she tells the officers “I am going to die” and “I am going to have a stroke.”
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The footage from inside of the vehicle was also released, and it shows Edwards attempting to sit up and saying she can’t breathe. After the officer pulls over a driver for allegedly driving recklessly, he opens the back door and finds Edwards unconscious.
“She’s not responding,” he yells to the officers in the police car. “I don’t know if she’s faking it or what, but she’s not answering.”
Edwards is then taken back to the hospital. The next day, she died of a stroke, according to a press release from the district attorney general’s office.
Family members of Edwards have spoken out about the disturbing video footage.
“I can’t believe she was treated the way she was. I just can’t even wrap my head around it. I just want people to remember her as a loving, caring person,” her son, Tim Boylan toldWATE. “Not what these guys made her out to be. The security guards were saying all kinds of stuff that’s not true about her. She did not deserve to be treated like that. Nobody does.”
Edwards flew from Rhode Island, where she was living, to Knoxville on Feb. 4 before complaining of stomach pain, which prompted her first hospital visit. Her family told the outlet that she moved from Tennessee to Rhode Island in late 2018 to be closer to her family, but was moving back to Knoxville to live with a friend.
“The police officers may not have done anything intentionally criminal to cause anything to happen to her, but they definitely were negligent and had no respect for human life, any basic needs, anything,” August Boylan, Edwards’ daughter-in-law, told WATE.
source: people.com
