Angela Harris Curry stood by her son’s grave and replayed the voicemail, the only noise in the quiet Fort Lauderdale cemetery aside from chirping birds.
The message had come from a nurse who did not identify herself, but had worked at one of the three hospitals Harris Curry’s son Treon Johnson was taken to on Feb. 27, 2014. In the voicemail, left the day after he died, the nurse urged Harris Curry no fewer than 10 times to get an attorney. She said that her son’s life could have been saved, but he was failed by multiple hospitals. And she said that Hialeah Police should never have shocked him with a Taser.
“I’m just letting you know you really need to get an attorney,” the nurse said in the recording, which Harris Curry has saved for the past 10 years. “I know, I’m really sorry for your loss, but you need to look into getting an attorney to look at the police department, how they handled the case. When they Tased your son he was already injured, and they shouldn’t have Tased him.”
Police shocked Johnson, 27, first in the front of his chest and a second time in his back while lying restrained on his stomach, autopsy records say. His death was not attributed to the Taser, or to any force officers used on Johnson that day.
Instead, Johnson’s death was attributed to a medical phenomenon known as excited delirium and deemed an accident by a Miami-Dade County medical examiner.
His death is not unique.
Johnson is one of at least 19 men in South Florida in the past 10 years whose cause of death was concluded by medical examiners to be excited delirium — a disputed, elusive phenomenon that got its start in Miami four decades ago and has become the focus of a growing national controversy ever since. Since 1994, a total of 53 people have died from excited delirium in Miami-Dade County. Seven have died in Broward since 2000, the earliest date with complete data. The Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office said it could not provide data specific to excited delirium because it “does not keep track of deaths in that format.” However, at least eight deaths have occurred there since 2014, based on records reviewed by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Excited delirium deaths in South Florida and across the country share commonalities: a sweating, agitated, incoherent man detached from reality — often high on cocaine or synthetic drugs — is restrained, sometimes aggressively, by police. During their struggles with police, sufferers of the syndrome become unresponsive and are soon pronounced dead.
Of the 19 people in South Florida whose causes of death were attributed to excited delirium since 2014, most occurred after an interaction with police, and officers used some type of force in the majority of those cases. But all were considered to have died by accident, the South Florida Sun Sentinel has found. For those who died after an interaction with police, only twice did medical examiners note the use of restraint or force by officers when they detailed the cause of death.
Yet the relationship between police and excited delirium is so pronounced that law enforcement and medical experts often cite police involvement in descriptions of the syndrome. One prominent Miami-Dade medical examiner referred to excited delirium as a precursor of “sudden in-custody death.”
An article published on the FBI website reads, “In addition to the significant morbidity and mortality associated with unrecognized ExDS (excited delirium syndrome), a substantial risk for litigation exists. These patients often die within 1 hour of police involvement. One study showed 75 percent of deaths from ExDS occurred at the scene or during transport.”
Critics say there’s no evidence people truly die from excited delirium alone. Rather, they argue, it has been used routinely as a catch-all explanation for the deaths, disproportionately involving Black men, when officers’ use of force may have contributed.
“Excited delirium is essentially a discarded theory,” said Dr. Michael Freeman, a forensic epidemiologist who co-authored a 2020 study that looked at close to 200 cases and concluded there was no evidence that excited delirium could cause death without police restraint. “… It’s an exculpatory term, and that’s the problem and the difficulty with it.”
Others disagree. Dr. Deborah Mash, a University of Miami neurology professor and one of the pioneers of research on the syndrome, has argued in medical papers that while scientists have not found the missing piece that links it to death, it appears that a combination of psychiatric issues and drug use triggers a cascade of problems that end in cardiac arrest.
The term was coined by a Miami-Dade County medical examiner in the 1980s, who cited it as the cause of death for over a dozen Black women, almost all sex workers, whose bodies were found partially naked in Miami. Police later determined that the women were likely murdered by a serial killer.
In the mid-to-late 2010s, South Florida became a quasi-epicenter for excited delirium after stimulant designer street drugs like bath salts and flakka hit the market for as little as $5 a hit. The symptoms associated with people high on those synthetic drugs are nearly identical to symptoms of people said to be experiencing excited delirium — violence and aggression, paranoia, psychosis, superhuman strength, hyperthermia and even death.
Scenes of people high on flakka in South Florida include a naked gunman on a rooftop yelling that someone was trying to kill him, a paranoid man who tried to break the glass of the Fort Lauderdale Police station, a man who impaled himself on a security fence, and a man who attacked an 82-year-old woman when she answered his knock at her door.
Police and paramedics who have experienced such episodes firsthand say the syndrome of excited delirium is very real and can kill the people experiencing it. People described as having excited delirium often endanger themselves and those around them, and frequently officers must use force to get them under control so they can get medical treatment.
But excited delirium has also come up as an alternative cause of death in instances of police misconduct, later to be disproven. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 in Minnesota, defense attorneys for Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with killing Floyd, claimed Floyd had suffered from it.
As Floyd lay with Chauvin’s knee on his neck, a fellow police officer said, “Should we roll him on the side? I just worry about the excited delirium or whatever,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
Less than a year before Floyd’s murder, Elijah McClain, 23, had been walking home from a convenience store in Colorado when police arrested him and placed him in a chokehold. To try to subdue him, paramedics injected him with 500 milligrams of ketamine, enough for someone close to twice his weight. He later died.
Two paramedics who were on trial after McClain’s death told investigators that McClain had excited delirium, the Associated Press reported. A medical examiner determined it was complications from the overdose of ketamine after being forcibly restrained that killed him, according to McClain’s autopsy report. Two paramedics and one police officer were convicted of criminally negligent homicide in his death.
Since the deaths of Floyd and McClain, medical organizations across the country have taken stances against use of the term or no longer endorse using it, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the National Association of Medical Examiners. California and Colorado passed legislation in 2023 banning various uses of the term by law enforcement and in autopsies. In June 2024, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill banning police officers from receiving training on excited delirium.
Some changes have caught on in Florida, too. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement removed the syndrome from its training policies this year, though it said in a letter to its Criminal Justice Training Center directors that the move had no effect on what local agencies choose to do.
Despite some changes in Florida, nearly all fire rescue agencies in South Florida continue to refer to excited delirium in their policies. For example, Davie Fire Rescue’s policy warns of excited delirium causing “sudden unexpected death,” stating: “The vast majority of patients that have died in police custody have shown signs of excited delirium.”
Policies recommend injecting ketamine or other drugs, and urge firefighter-paramedics to refrain from holding the person in a prone position, the position in which Floyd and some of the men who died in South Florida were restrained.
The Sun Sentinel requested current policies pertaining to excited delirium from nearly two dozen law enforcement agencies in the region. The few that responded by publication date said they did not have policies specific to the term, but deputies and officers had mentioned the term in numerous police reports in the past several years. Officers in some areas of the state are still trained in recognizing and responding to the syndrome.
Meanwhile, none of the three South Florida medical examiners’ offices have an established policy pertaining to use of the term. It remains unclear whether the doctors within those offices have opted not to use the term for personal reasons; all medical examiners contacted for this story declined to comment or did not return requests for comment.
The numbers
Of the 19 deaths attributed to excited delirium since 2014 for which autopsies were available, at least seven men died after a forceful interaction with police — including being punched and kicked, sprayed with chemical irritants, shocked with Tasers and restrained in prone positions, among other types of force, the Sun Sentinel found. Five of them were Black men.
None of the 19 deaths were ruled homicides. Nearly all were ruled accidental deaths aside from one ruled undetermined in Palm Beach County and one ruled a natural death.
Only one autopsy in Palm Beach County noted that the man died while being restrained. In Miami-Dade County, only one autopsy noted a “physical struggle” associated with a man’s cause of death. When the State Attorney’s Office asked the medical examiner in that Miami-Dade case for clarification on whether he meant the officers used excessive force, the medical examiner told them that he meant the man’s own actions that brought on the struggle, not the police.
It was not possible to determine exactly when or what kind of force police was used in all of the cases, as it was not always described in detail in the police or medical examiners’ reports obtained by the Sun Sentinel.
Though several occurred after police interactions, not all deaths in South Florida were similar. Two people died after encounters with officers where records said they didn’t use any force, and excited delirium was also listed as a cause of death for eight people who had little to no interaction with officers.
One man collapsed at his girlfriend’s home and began seizing. One man in a mental health facility became “combative” with fire rescue paramedics and became unresponsive. Two men were found dead in homes left in states of disarray. While most of those who died had been on drugs, two men did not test positive for any. One of those two men had a history of mental health issues.
In Broward County, no deaths have been attributed to excited delirium in the 10 years since 2014. But between 2001 and 2008, seven people were concluded to have died from excited delirium, including at least three men who were Tased.
In one case from 2003, a man named Kerry Kevin O’Brien died from positional asphyxia after Pembroke Pines police officers shocked him with a Taser multiple times, hogtied and restrained in a prone position, according to a 2008 report on deaths after Taser use from the human rights nonprofit Amnesty International. He did not have any drugs in his system. Broward medical examiner records say excited delirium was a contributing cause of his death, and his death was ruled an accident.
In 2001, the cause of death for Ralph Jenkins in Plantation was “sudden death following physical and chemical restraint” with excited delirium as a contributing cause. His death, too, was ruled an accident.
Family members and others close to the 19 who have died since 2014 never knew that their autopsies listed the controversial term as their cause of death until contacted by the Sun Sentinel. Some had never before heard of excited delirium.
Rickey Curry, Treon Johnson’s father, said he and his family never heard from the police department or Hialeah city officials about what happened in the wake of their son’s death. They believe they would have received some answers had they gone to court.
“We don’t have the resources. As working-class people, we don’t have those type of resources and information to open up these kinds of investigations,” he said.
Troubled history rooted in South Florida
When a string of Black women in Miami were found naked from the waist down with their legs spread apart, a Dade County medical examiner concluded the cause was excited delirium.
It was 1988, and Dr. Charles Wetli had just completed a research paper three years earlier that first recognized excited delirium.
“For some reason the male of the species becomes psychotic and the female of the species dies in relation to sex,” Wetli told the Miami News at the time.
In his 1985 paper, “Cocaine-induced psychosis and sudden death in recreational cocaine users,” Wetli had examined seven deaths, five of which occurred in police custody, though the paper did not examine whether police played a role. He concluded that “excited delirium,” a mysterious syndrome brought on by cocaine use, had caused their respiratory systems to collapse.
Wetli was a “self-proclaimed Afro-Caribbean cult expert” who began his career during the nationwide “Satanic panic” and right after the influx of Cubans during the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, two events that seemed to influence his work, according to Aisha Beliso De Jesus, an anthropology professor at Princeton University who wrote a book on excited delirium.
The Satanic panic was a mass moral panic based on the idea that satanic cults were causing widespread abuse throughout the country. According to Beliso De Jesus’ book, Wetli began studying the bodies of Afro-Caribbean men for the purposes of researching some of these alleged cults, then became interested in cocaine use.
“It’s really a sort of disturbing series of circumstances that I think arise to him coining the term,” Beliso De Jesus told the Sun Sentinel.
Between 1987 and 1989, a total of 19 sex workers would be found dead in Miami. Yet as women continued to die, the Dade County Medical Examiner’s office repeatedly ruled their deaths were drug-related, not homicides. Then Wetli emerged with a theory: He claimed that they had died from excited delirium caused by a mix of cocaine and sex, a syndrome that appeared differently in women and men. When asked why the victims were only Black women, Wetli theorized that cocaine interacts with Black people differently. He said that small amounts of cocaine in the women’s systems made it unlikely that they could have been killed without a struggle.
“It seems like Miami is on the cutting edge,” he told a Miami Herald reporter at the time, referring to South Florida. “What we see here, other people see three years later.”
Superhuman strength remains a commonly cited symptom of excited delirium today. But the idea of Black people specifically having unusual strength or an imperviousness to pain also echoes a racist trope, Beliso De Jesus wrote, once used to justify the treatment of slaves.
Still, Wetli’s theory spread, bolstered by the news of the women’s shocking deaths.
“If true, that would explain the partially disrobed bodies,” a Los Angeles Times article said of the theory at the time. “Cheap hookers often exchange sex for crack cocaine. They ply their trade in abandoned buildings or the tall weeds of vacant lots.”
Police were “reluctant” at first to attribute the deaths to a serial killer, the Herald reported, even though it seemed odd that the deaths were happening only in a specific area of Miami and only to Black women.
“He actually convinces everyone, police and so on, ‘no, no, no, this is not murder,’” Beliso De Jesus said.
But when a 14-year-old girl was found dead soon after in the same manner, this time without cocaine in her system, police began to question the theory. The chief medical examiner, Wetli’s boss, re-examined the bodies of over a dozen women, finding signs of asphyxiation so pronounced, he told the Herald, “You could stand 10 feet away, it’s that clear.”
Police said that Charles Henry Williams, a suspected serial killer, was their main suspect, but by the time they named him, they lacked physical evidence. He was never charged with the murders and later died in prison serving a sentence for rape.
The term “excited delirium” caught on anyway.
‘Is he not breathing?’
Shortly after 1 a.m. on July 17, 2019, Omar Stevens, 28, was being chased by Boynton Beach Police before he crashed in West Palm Beach at the intersection of North Tamarind Avenue and Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and ran away on foot, according to an FDLE in-custody death investigation report. A bystander who was walking in the area after the crash told an officer at the scene that Stevens tried to steal his phone and was “talking about Jesus Christ,” according to body-worn camera video obtained by the Sun Sentinel.
The first West Palm Beach officer to arrive found Stevens sitting on a sidewalk three blocks away from where he crashed, shirtless, bloodied, dripping in sweat and hysterical, according to the FDLE report and body-worn camera footage. He would be pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Medical Center an hour later.
Not long after officers arrived, Stevens started shouting for officers to call his family and calling for help. He said that officers were trying to “put voodoo” on him, the body-camera videos and FDLE report show. The officers were only standing near him at that moment. One officer asked Stevens if he took “bad weed” that night.
Stevens grew visibly more agitated and frightened, stating that an officer “just put that spirit” on him. He then jumped up and tried to run.
An officer took Stevens to the ground as he screamed. Multiple officers then struggled to get Stevens in handcuffs, their frustration with him growing more evident each moment, the footage showed. One officer could be seen pressing his foot on the back of Stevens’ neck as others struggled to get his arms behind his back. Officers warned him multiple times he would be shocked with a Taser.
Once officers pulled Stevens’ hands behind his back, and while he was lying face down on the ground, another officer used his hand to put weight on the back of Stevens’ head. Another stepped on Stevens’ back with his right foot, the video showed.
As the struggle continued, he appeared to break free of their grip, and an officer shouted numerous times for an officer to “Tase him!” Stevens was then shocked for the first time.
“What the f— did I do to deserve this? What did I do to deserve this?” a breathless Stevens later said during the fight after being shocked multiple times. Video showed one officer’s hand grabbing Stevens’ neck underneath his chin.
During the roughly four-minute fight, two officers deployed their Tasers over a dozen times, according to the FDLE report, including one driving a Taser directly against Stevens’ skin. One of the officers was shocked during the struggle, too.
It took 10 minutes for officers to handcuff him. Multiple times during the fight, Stevens said he couldn’t breathe. Officers said “if he was yelling, he was breathing,” according to the FDLE report.
After Stevens was handcuffed and his legs hobbled, one officer said to turn Stevens on his side, “so he can breathe better.” Two officers held Stevens on his side as he lay on the sidewalk, and until he was eventually put on a stretcher, officers repeated that Stevens needed to be on his side to breathe.
Nearly 10 minutes after Stevens was handcuffed and hobbled, a paramedic injected him with 200 mg of ketamine, according to video and autopsy records — about half of the maximum dose recommended for agitated patients by most fire rescue agencies in South Florida.
Three minutes after Stevens was injected with ketamine, someone could be heard asking officers in the video, “Is he fighting you or no?” “Not really,” an officer replied.
Seconds later, the officers and paramedics picked Stevens up and put him on a stretcher with his legs still hobbled, his hands in cuffs behind his back and a spit hood over his head, a type of bag used to prevent people from spitting or biting.
“I don’t think he’s breathing …” someone could be heard saying in the video. The paramedics then rolled the stretcher to the ambulance.
Multiple officers gathered around the back of the fire rescue truck once Stevens was inside. One officer asked another, “Is he not breathing?” The footage shows the same officer then say: “ED.”
The medical examiner determined Stevens’ cause of death was “Excited delirium and dehydration due to N-ethylpentylone toxicity,” the official term for bath salts, and that his injury occurred from using the drug. The autopsy report said: “cardiac arrest was witnessed after administration of ketamine.” His death was ruled an accident.
Years later, the State Attorney’s Office concluded that none of the officers contributed to Stevens’ death, citing the autopsy report in its decision.
A report signed by Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg and addressed to then-Police Chief Frank Adderley in June 2020 said that the officers did not cause or exacerbate Stevens’ death “directly or indirectly,” pointing to the autopsy.
“It is clear from the autopsy report that the Taser use did not cause or exacerbate the cause of death, nor did any of the physical strikes employed to seek control of Stevens as he violently resisted arrest after being handcuffed,” the report said.
Not everyone who reviewed the autopsy report reached the same conclusion.
“The autopsy report has a very unclear recitation of the timeline and when he became unresponsive, but the cause of death is frankly silly,” said Freeman, the critic of excited delirium who reviewed the autopsy at the Sun Sentinel’s request. “The (medical examiner) does note that the decedent was given a drug that could kill him and he nearly immediately became unresponsive, and then said he died from bath salts and (excited delirium). What was the point of reviewing the body cam footage if it was completely ignored?”
Other experts had a more neutral stance.
“This 100% sounds like what we typically mean when we say excited delirium,” Dr. Brian Ackerman, an emergency physician at Delray Medical Center and expert court witness, said after reviewing the records in Stevens’ case at the Sun Sentinel’s request.
It would be impossible for first responders to tell at that moment whether Stevens’ episode was drug-related or a psychiatric issue, Ackerman said — the two most common causes of the syndrome.
Ackerman acknowledged that excited delirium is a “very loaded term.”
“I think a lot of the issue is people are diagnosing it after the fact … That’s where part of the controversy comes from,” he said. “It is a very real phenomenon.”
Officers who respond well in these situations “tend to only use the minimum amount of force needed to restrain them and they don’t usually deploy that until it’s needed,” Ackerman said.
“From a medical perspective, it sounds like they did everything right,” he said. “It was just a very unfortunate outcome that they tried to avoid … but may not have been able to avoid.”
Little was reported about Stevens’ death at the time and in the years after. Stevens’ relatives did not return voicemails from the Sun Sentinel seeking an interview.
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’
Like Treon Johnson’s family, relatives of other men who died in police custody in South Florida said they were told little, if any, information about what happened with police before they died and in the years since. Craig Shumake’s sister Latosia Lockett was one.
On July 24, 2014, about 10:30 p.m., Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputies were called to a home in Lake Worth Beach where a group of men were fighting, according to Sheriff’s Office offense reports obtained by the Sun Sentinel. By the time deputies arrived, Shumake had been knocking on strangers’ doors and was behind a nearby home, “acting as if he was high on cocaine,” speaking nonsensically and drenched in sweat.
Deputies were handcuffing Shumake when he started to “aggressively resist” and kick. Multiple deputies struggled with him for several minutes to get him handcuffed and restrained with a hobble, the offense reports said. Seconds after being restrained, Shumake “went limp” and was “losing consciousness.”
The extent of the force deputies used in the minutes-long struggle is not thoroughly detailed in the reports, but they describe Shumake being restrained face down in the prone position, being able to lift his body partly off the ground as one of the deputies sat on top of him and deputies turning his face sideways before he passed out.
Deputies attempted CPR until fire rescue took him to the hospital. He was removed from life support and died in the hospital on July 26, 2014.
A medical examiner’s office investigator told the Sheriff’s Office “there were no obvious signs of trauma” found during Shumake’s autopsy and that his manner of death was undetermined as the toxicology tests were pending. Later, excited delirium due to flakka toxicity “while being restrained” was determined to be his cause of death.
Shumake’s sister Lockett said until contacted by the Sun Sentinel, she was told “nothing, absolutely nothing” about her brother’s death since 2014. All she knew was that the police were called for something, but didn’t know what, and that her brother was in the hospital.
“I needed to pretty much start notifying family members, and I was at work so I had to leave work and pretty much go down and watch my brother die. During that time, the doctors came in, they did what they did … but as far as anything being said as to what actually took place, no one said anything,” Lockett told the Sun Sentinel.
Shumake was a drug user, Lockett knew. She said she was more like his mother than his older sister and did her best to take care of him, but he went down a troubled path.
“He didn’t enter his darker parts until his later teen years,” she said. “Before that, he was a regular kid.”
Shumake was incarcerated for a time, and when he was released, he began using more drugs, his sister said. For 10 years, Lockett had assumed her brother’s cause of death would have been an overdose, not excited delirium, she said.
“For me over the years … it was more so of, ‘What drugs did he take? What actually caused his death?’ But me accepting it was just me knowing he was doing different types of drugs and he was in the streets,” Lockett said.
‘A homicide’s not a murder’
Keith Wooten, 46, was “acting weird” the day he died in Miami in 2017, according to his autopsy report, wearing only boxer shorts when he jumped into someone else’s car. He had been released from a yearslong prison sentence just three days earlier.
Police arrived and told him to get out of the vehicle. As he got out, he charged at them and was Tased in the back by two officers. He “continued to fight” until he was handcuffed, according to autopsy records. He then lost consciousness and was pronounced dead in the emergency room of North Shore Medical Center. The extent and details of the force police used are not detailed in the report.
Wooten’s brother, Garry, told the Sun Sentinel that he didn’t know much about what happened to him. He said he had watched a video, taken from a neighbor’s surveillance camera, of police Tasing his brother on the ground. He said he was told he couldn’t sue the police department for a wrongful death because he was only a sibling, so he never did.
“All I know is he did 16 years in prison,” Garry Wooten said. “And when he got out, the next day, he was killed by the police.”
But Wooten’s autopsy said he wasn’t killed by police. Medical Examiner Dr. Kenneth Hutchins wrote Wooten’s cause of death was cocaine-induced excited delirium “with associated physical struggle,” according to the autopsy report. When asked about the struggle, he told prosecutors it was Wooten’s struggle, not officers, that contributed to the death.
“Dr. Hutchins was emphatic that it was Mr. Wooten’s action of starting a struggle that he was referring, not the actions of the officers,” said a 2018 State Attorney’s Office close-out memo.
Hutchins also said the Taser in no way contributed to Wooten’s death, the State Attorney’s Office memo said. The officers were not charged.
Hutchins, now the chief medical examiner for Miami-Dade County, declined to be interviewed when reached by phone by the Sun Sentinel, saying his office does not speak to the media.
Like nearly all of the excited delirium deaths in South Florida, Wooten’s was ruled an accident. A 2002 guide issued by the National Association of Medical Examiners dictated that excited delirium deaths “directly” due to “excited delirium from acute cocaine intoxication” are traditionally considered accidents, though they also state: “Deaths due to positional restraint induced by law enforcement personnel or to choke holds or other measures to subdue may be classified as Homicide.”
“Further, there is some value to the homicide classification toward reducing the public perception that a ‘cover up’ is being perpetrated by the death investigation agency,” the guide said.
In other areas of the United States, some officials have ruled some excited delirium deaths as homicides.
A recent Associated Press investigation into police force in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism titled “Lethal Restraint” found 21 excited delirium deaths that were ruled homicides. Medical examiners mentioned physical restraint and Tasers, in part, in some of the causes of those deaths. Relatives in some of those cases filed wrongful death lawsuits. Prosecutors and law enforcement agencies opened investigations into the deaths, according to media reports.
A homicide is defined as when someone dies at the hands of another. There does not have to be criminal intent for a death to be ruled a homicide, medical examiners say.
“A homicide’s not a murder,” said Freeman, the forensic pathologist who is skeptical of the syndrome. “A homicide is just a death that, absent the intentional actions of another person — not to kill, but intentional actions — that death would not have happened. If someone died while they’re being restrained, if you die with the handcuffs on, pretty much it’s going to be homicide.”
Freeman doesn’t blame individuals for doing what they have been taught so much as the teaching itself. For a long time, police officers, paramedics and medical examiners have been told that restraint alone cannot cause death, he said. Excited delirium is an alternative explanation.
A homicide ruling doesn’t mean officers did something illegal or even intentional, police experts say. Sometimes the use of force is necessary for an officer to protect his or her own life.
Pete Ebel, a retired lieutenant with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, has long trained officers on how to respond to people said to be experiencing excited delirium. He has seen the phenomenon time and time again, often in ways that endangered the public. He said that police officers who respond are often put in difficult situations where they have no other choice but to respond with force, only to get criticized later.
Still, he was surprised to hear that an autopsy would exclude the use of force as a cause of death in favor of excited delirium, and that the death would be listed as an accident. Most of the incidents he recalled from his time as an officer were ruled homicides, he said, because of the use of force.
“It still gets classified as a homicide,” Ebel said, “because it’s a situation wherein someone uses force and someone dies.”
Excited delirium has been named as a cause of death more times in Miami than in many entire states, according to the Associated Press data. But the data is also hard to interpret because it could also be influenced by state and county public records laws, which tend to be more open in Florida. Reporters said that some cities and states were underrepresented in the data because they were less responsive to records requests.
Moving away from the term
In 2023, the National Association of Medical Examiners issued a statement saying it would no longer endorse the use of excited delirium as a cause of death. The underlying cause “for the delirious state” must be determined and used instead.
The announcement came a year after Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit that advocates against and investigates human rights violations, issued a 2022 report urging medical examiners not to cite it as a cause of death or even a partial cause.
“Too often, law enforcement officers are called as the sole first responders to medical emergencies and then use violent methods to forcibly restrain people manifesting these signs, methods — such as those that induce asphyxia from prone and other forms of restraint — that themselves may cause death,” the report said. “Consequently, ‘excited delirium,’ rather than law enforcement actions, is cited as the cause of death, or as a factor contributing to death, in autopsy reports.”
The shift away from using the term raises questions about the autopsies in South Florida over the past decade.
“Why was it acceptable then and not now?” Cidela Hubbard, who was Treon Johnson’s girlfriend when he died in 2014, asked the Sun Sentinel.
The Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s office did not respond to multiple emails or calls seeking information on whether they still use excited delirium as a cause of death, given that the National Association of Medical Examiners now advises against it.
It is similarly unclear whether Broward or Palm Beach County’s medical examiner’s offices still use excited delirium as a cause of death. A Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office records technician told the Sun Sentinel the last time a death was listed as excited delirium was in 2020. Broward’s Medical Examiner’s Office does not have any policies about what individual doctors can use as a cause of death. Neither does the Florida Medical Examiners Commission.
“The Medical Examiners Commission has not taken a stance on excited delirium. The Commission’s role is to see if there are any violations of statute, administrative code or practice guidelines. The Commission does not in any way dictate cause and manner of death to medical examiners,” the office said in a statement.
The Sun Sentinel reached out to nearly a dozen associate medical examiners who performed the South Florida autopsies. Hutchins, who declined to comment, was the only person who responded.
Taser deaths and excited delirium
Excited delirium’s history in South Florida was muddy even after Wetli incorrectly applied the term to the 19 women. In the early 2000s, Dr. Deborah Mash began to spearhead research on the term from Miami.
A former Dade County medical examiner who trained under Wetli, Mash led research of the syndrome during her tenure at the University of Miami. She contributed her input to autopsies of deaths attributed to excited delirium both in Miami and the rest of the country.
Mash declined to comment for this article but referred a reporter to a 2016 research paper, where she acknowledged the controversy around the term’s use in autopsies where people died in police custody, including those shocked with electrical weapons.
She wrote that though “the precise cause and mechanism” of how people die “remains controversial,” the reasons excited delirium victims suddenly die “are seen to be ‘biological,” stemming from excessive dopamine in the brain that ultimately causes people to stop breathing and their hearts to stop beating, “a lethal cascade of neutral activities that progress to asphyxia and sudden cardiac arrest.”
She cited Wetli’s and others’ research throughout the years that said medical examiners did not find in excited delirium cases “a definite anatomic cause of death,” but they excluded drug overdoses, trauma and underlying heart disease as causes.
The syndrome emerges as a state of heightening paranoia, high body temperature and the failed function of dopamine transporters, she wrote. Those at risk of experiencing excited delirium and suddenly dying are people withdrawing from or who are not complying with psychiatric medications, those withdrawing from alcohol abuse, and people experiencing acute manic episodes, among others.
“Most drug-related excited delirium victims are chronic freebase cocaine (“crack”) abusers, usually engaged in a ‘binge’ pattern of drug use,” she wrote.
Mash believes cases of excited delirium and data need to be tracked at a national level, according to the paper. Some critics have called for that, too.
“Excited delirium is a syndromal disorder, which is controversial and highly debated precisely because the mechanism of lethality is unknown,” she wrote in her conclusion.
At the same time as they worked as medical examiners, Mash and Wetli had other roles as well: serving as paid expert witnesses for Taser, a company now known as Axon, as the Miami New Times first reported in 2010.
Axon often uses excited delirium syndrome as a possible alternative cause of death to its stun guns and as an argument in lawsuits, and has been closely linked with Mash and the emerging science surrounding the term. A 2009 research paper about excited delirium that is still widely cited today includes three experts as co-authors, including Mash — all of whom were paid expert witnesses for Taser, a Reuters investigation revealed in 2017.
The company had a systematic approach to deaths involving the stun gun’s use, according to court documents: Immediately emailing police agencies with information about excited delirium and sample news releases to give reporters. One of the company’s instructions: have brain tissue sent to the University of Miami as soon as possible so Mash could study it for excited delirium.
For years after the New Times story, medical examiners continued to send Mash brain tissue and include her diagnoses of excited delirium in their reports.
Four of the 11 autopsies out of Miami-Dade County reviewed by the Sun Sentinel involved the use of a Taser, records show. Mash wrote consultant reports pointing toward excited delirium in two of them: Johnson’s death and that of a man named Aviel Gutierrez.
Gutierrez began acting strangely on an early December morning in 2016 after he and his girlfriend passed a woman while walking in Coral Gables who “cursed” them, his girlfriend told police.
“I curse you. I curse everything you have. I curse everything you are wearing,” the woman said to them, Gutierrez’s girlfriend told police, according to a State Attorney’s Office memo.
When the couple got into their car, Gutierrez told his girlfriend “to take her clothes off because the woman had cursed them and they needed to seek forgiveness from Jehovah,” the memo said. He ordered her to pull over, and both got out of the car, where police found him attacking his girlfriend in the street.
She was wearing only a towel, which he kept trying to pull off. As he “lunged toward” his girlfriend, an officer shocked him, and multiple officers then tried to restrain him as he resisted and called out for Jehovah, the memo said. Two officers deployed their Tasers a total of seven times.
At least 10 officers responded to the scene, but it was not possible to determine exactly what each individual officer did to restrain him, the memo said.
As he was restrained face down in a prone position, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue gave him a sedative called Midazolam, also called Versed, which is used as a form of chemical restraint.
According to an account from a Coral Gables officer given to prosecutors, Gutierrez was given 20 milligrams of Versed, which is twice the maximum amount recommended for sedation by several South Florida fire rescue agencies. Most fire rescue policies also emphasize that the person should not be restrained in a prone position, as Gutierrez was.
He went into cardiac arrest 10 minutes after being given Versed, the memo said, and was pronounced dead at a hospital less than an hour later.
An otherwise healthy man, Gutierrez did not die from the sedative, any underlying condition, any form of restraint or the Taser, concluded Hutchins, the medical examiner who also conducted Wooten’s autopsy, the State Attorney’s Office memo said.
Hutchins ruled Gutierrez’s cause of death to be drug-induced excited delirium after Mash consulted on the case and after reviewing all other forms of evidence in his case.
In Mash’s attached report, she analyzed heat shock proteins and dopamine transporters in the brain as “biomarkers” of excited delirium.
“Decreased number of dopamine transporters (DAT) in the brain results in the loss of dopamine transport function in cases of excited delirium and sudden in-custody death,” she wrote.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle later cited the autopsy in her office’s decision not to charge the officers involved.
Gutierrez’s girlfriend at the time declined to speak with the Sun Sentinel out of respect to his family. His cousin also declined to speak on behalf of the family. Other family members did not return calls or texts.
Mash’s reports typically cite brain “biomarkers” of excited delirium, molecules that give evidence of some kind of health condition. She displays graphs that show the difference between excited delirium brains and others, linking the biomarkers to acute heart conditions and death.
But Freeman says the research he has seen from Mash is theoretical; there is no definitive test for excited delirium. Every conclusion a doctor makes in an autopsy is simply an inference based on what occurred leading up to the death, he said, and yet those autopsies often seem to exclude police involvement.
Just over a decade ago, in 2013, a young graffiti artist’s death was almost attributed to excited delirium before a medical examiner ruled it was the use of a Taser instead.
Israel Hernandez Llach, 19, was killed in 2013 after he was caught tagging a McDonald’s and ran from an officer. The officer chased him and then shocked him in the chest.
The same day as his death, court records first published by Reuters show, Taser contacted Miami Beach Police with guidance on what to do next. One of those steps was to send Hernandez Llach’s brain tissue to Mash, which they did. Mash wrote in her report that his tissue showed evidence of excited delirium, court records show. But the Miami medical examiner ruled his death the result of the Taser and said that he had exhibited none of the usual symptoms of the syndrome.
Excited delirium has been used as a defense by Axon in several similar lawsuits.
Todd Falzone, who represented Hernandez Llach’s family in suing Miami Beach, said he studied many excessive force cases citing excited delirium. In some places, he said, police agencies have given medical examiners literature and binders of articles on the syndrome.
“It’s an explanation for a death they’re struggling to diagnose,” Falzone said. “I think it kind of takes on a life of its own.”
Hernandez Llach’s family settled their case with Miami Beach. Falzone could not comment on the exact details of the case due to the settlement.
Axon’s safety materials and instructions for law enforcement have warned against shocking people in the chest and advise that people with excited delirium are among those who “may be particularly susceptible to the effects” of the weapon.
Whether someone can die from a Taser is “contentious in medical literature, but does occur in rare circumstances,” then-associated medical examiner Hutchins said in the close-out memo in Gutierrez’s case in 2016. For someone to die, the probes must hit the front of the chest and the heart must be within the probes, with one of the probes close to the heart, the memo said. A death in that case would happen within seconds, though, not later, Hutchins said.
Mash and Wetli aren’t the only Miami-Dade medical examiners to face scrutiny. Another of the 19 deaths ruled an accident by a Miami-Dade medical examiner was that of Michael Roque, 33, who died after police were called to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend over a loud fight. Officers restrained Roque in a prone position because he was combative, the autopsy states. He stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest.
But the medical examiner who oversaw Roque’s case, Emma Lew, did not mention the use of prone restraint or any other physical struggle as a contributing factor to the death. Instead, she ruled it an accident due to excited delirium associated with cocaine and flakka use.
Lew would face scrutiny over a different case: Two years prior, in 2012, a Miami-Dade inmate named Darren Rainey was locked in a scalding shower by a corrections officer until he died, reports say. Multiple medical experts said Rainey had burns on his body. But Lew said Rainey’s skin showed no signs of burns and ruled his death an accident caused by “schizophrenia, atherosclerotic heart disease and confinement inside the shower room,” according to news reports citing a State Attorney’s Office close-out memo, leading prosecutors not to file charges. She later received a promotion.
‘I don’t care what they call it’
In a dark conference room in July, Pete Ebel, the retired lieutenant from PBSO, played video after video of officers responding to fully or partially naked men acting bizarrely and sometimes aggressively in public, then getting restrained by police. In one incident that took place while the TV show “Cops” was filming in Palm Beach County, Donny Lewis, the son of an officer, died.
“Look at the videos … I have innumerable videos of this occurring,” Ebel said when asked how he would respond to critics who say the phenomenon doesn’t exist. “How can anybody deny that this is a real — whatever you want to call it — syndrome, problem, issue? Whatever you want to call it, it makes people go manic.”
He added: “I don’t care what they call it, but at least recognize that that manic behavior contributed to the death.”
Ebel has been training police officers on excited delirium since 1998. The training has changed over the decades, becoming more “patient-focused,” he said. Police used to throw people in the back of a patrol car and take them to jail. Now, they make sure they receive medical attention and go to a hospital in an ambulance. Since the 2020 death of Floyd, they’ve moved away from the use of prone restraint. Often, several officers must restrain a person at once — an approach that has become more common in recent years and one that is actually safer, Ebel said, because each officer uses less force.
He thinks some of these changes have resulted in fewer deaths in recent years. But the phenomenon, and how to respond to it, persists.
Now that several states have banned the use of the term, police agencies have begun referring to excited delirium in other ways. Some South Florida fire rescue agencies’ protocols call it agitated delirium.
Ebel flipped through a PowerPoint for one of his training presentations. One slide lists the most up-to-date terms like “hyperactive delirium” and “complications from substance misuse.”
“I believe this whole thing on dialing it back on the name is just political correctness,” he said. “Nobody wants to hang their reputation and their name on this controversial thing because they’re afraid they’re going to be labeled as excusing the police.”
The use of new terminology isn’t just unpopular with police; critics and family members worry that police agencies will simply substitute a new term for the old one without changing anything about how these cases are handled.
Regardless of what the phenomenon is called, officers are still expected to handle it, which makes the current climate around it frustrating for people like Ebel.
Police officers don’t want the people in their custody to die, he said, but they are often given limited options. They are put in a position where they have to respond to protect the well-being of the person with the syndrome and anyone they might endanger in the process, but that person is usually noncompliant, requiring officers to use force.
“We’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” he said. “If we walk away and let this guy expire, we’re getting sued.”
Joe Langlois, a retired firefighter and paramedic with the Broward Sheriff’s Office Fire Rescue for over 30 years, said he had responded to about 10 different excited delirium calls over his career. The superhuman strength was a real concern for him and his fellow paramedics; he recalled a time when someone suffering from the syndrome ripped a metal bar off a hospital bed.
“Three of us would sit on the guy just trying to keep him from going bonkers,” he said.
Langlois thinks policies could be improved, especially with more training for paramedics. But he doesn’t agree with blaming police and paramedics for just doing what they’re told.
“You really have to respond in a split second,” he said. “When they attack you and rip your throat out, or you’re injured terribly because they punch you … now every cop has the right to go home safe the way he came. Every fireman, every person in society has that right, but we’re not giving them that right.”
‘No direct answer’
Treon Johnson’s girlfriend Cidela Hubbard grew worried when he never came home from work.
On the morning of Feb. 27, 2014, Hialeah Police officers were called about a man fighting with a dog in someone’s backyard. Johnson began to run from the officers when they arrived, according to Medical Examiner’s Office records.
An officer first shocked Johnson in his chest, then a second time in his back. The autopsy findings list puncture wounds from the Taser in his lower back but do not mention any on his chest. It is unclear where in his chest he was shocked — an area of the body Axon says to avoid targeting. Further details about the officers’ use-of-force are not included in the report.
Johnson’s cause of death was listed in the autopsy report as excited delirium due to flakka and schizophrenia with dog-bite injuries listed as a contributing cause.
Initially, his mother Harris Curry said she was informed “about the dog and a dog bite.” “That’s all they talked about,” she said.
She and Hubbard said they were later given different accounts of what happened that day by different officers.
“There was no direct answer. Nobody gave us A, B and C,” Hubbard said. “Like nobody said, ‘This is the reason why (Johnson) passed away.’”
Hubbard said Johnson, whom she nicknamed “Brownie,” was an artist who had many hobbies — boxing, rapping, fashion, photography, a “jack of all trades,” she said. He was in good health at the time, leaning into his artistic passions and “flourishing.”
“Above it all, I was just still surprised and shocked that this person is not in my life anymore, above everything,” Hubbard said. “I know (Johnson’s) mom was working really hard trying to get answers, but it was just weighing in. Once you hit one dead end and another dead end, it was just weighing in on me.”
The day after Johnson’s death, his mother received the anonymous voicemail. “It’s disturbing,” she warned before playing it in the cemetery for a Sun Sentinel reporter, standing next to her son’s grave.
Harris Curry at first worked with an attorney, but she and the attorney both struggled to get records from the police department, she said.
“… From that point ’til three years later, I wasn’t getting any cooperation from the police. I wasn’t able to get the police reports … It was just long, drawn out for three years straight. I still don’t have the police report.”
Harris Curry said she also hired an outside coroner to perform an autopsy, but she was told she needed a court order to get his remains. She said she was told by medical staff at one of the hospitals that his intestines were punctured when they inserted a scope inside him.
“There are several reasons why he could have died …” she said. “That’s why I wanted to get his remains so that I can have another autopsy done, from a private company, but they did not allow me to do that,” she said.
Johnson was close with his mother and always checking on her, she said. He was close with his brothers, too, even though they fought like any siblings. One of Johnson’s brothers is well-known rapper Denzel Curry, and that sentiment of their family’s close-knit relationship is reflected in some of his lyrics — “My daddy said ‘Trust no man but your brothers’” he raps in a song titled after his father. He releases a dove in the song’s music video, an homage to Johnson.
“It would have been a battle between them two because they both were good,” Harris Curry said of Johnson and Denzel Curry’s music careers.
Harris Curry said she finds it hard to believe what is true about the day Johnson died.
“It’s so many different stories,” she said. “That’s why I’m saying — how can you believe what is true? How can you determine what he really died from?”
Filmmaker Billy Corben met Johnson while making his documentary “Dawg Fight” on backyard boxing in Perrine, which began streaming on Netflix in 2015 after Johnson’s death.
Corben had known of excited delirium long before meeting Johnson and long before learning that it is listed as his cause of death. He first learned of the term and its history in Miami when he was working on his documentary “Cocaine Cowboys” in the early 2000s.
“It made a real impression on me,” Corben said of learning the term’s origins and history.
Corben said Johnson was a “rough and tumble street fighter” who “had the heart of an artist.” He was a photographer and wanted to learn skills from Corben’s team.
“I don’t think he saw himself as a fighter. I think he saw himself as an artist. And I think he also knew that he had this kind of eccentric personality,” he said. “He was just like an interesting guy and he had a way about him, certainly outside of the ring, but even in the ring where he was just fun to watch,” he said.
Included in Johnson’s autopsy records is a three-page University of Miami Miller School of Medicine report that lists Mash as a consultant and which she signed, pointing toward analyses that “support the assignment of drug-related (excited delirium) for this case.”
Rickey Curry, Johnson’s father, said when he went to Jackson Memorial Hospital and viewed his son’s body, a nurse told him that he had been shocked with a Taser and went into cardiac arrest.
Upon learning of his son’s death, Curry said he was at first in shock, having just had to bury his own mother days earlier. Then he was angry. A part of the ordeal that was painful, he said, was that he never heard from the police department or city officials after his son’s death. Even now, he doesn’t know the names of the officers involved.
“I’m still trying to figure out why it was so hush-hush and why no one came and spoke with me personally. That’s all I had asked for — could we get closure? And I never got it,” he said.
But Johnson’s father said he feels like experts and medical organizations now taking stances against the term excited delirium is something “that should have been done a long time ago.”
“I always say this — out of tragedy usually comes a better change … Give these families, like myself and my family, closure. The truth and closure. ’Cause it seem like the truth is floating around out there and nobody wants to give us the truth on what the situation was,” he said.
Hubbard, too, still feels like she doesn’t have all the answers.
“Checks and balances — that’s what I’d like to see. And the check and balance I want to see is all those folks that got excited delirium as their cause of death, cases to be reopened and re-evaluated, and for somebody to actually do real work and find out what their cause of death is, or determine it undetermined, but don’t just list it as excited delirium if that really doesn’t have a true definition,” Hubbard said.
At least one state is revisiting deaths: In Maryland, Freeman is helping the attorney general’s office conduct an audit of several autopsies in which excited delirium was found as a cause.
“The fact that an erroneous determination which has now been found to be scientifically invalid has been used in the past, does that mean it stays that way?” he asked. “And does that mean that you forever deprive a family of the ability to know more about what happened to their loved one and potentially pursue justice?”
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report, along with information from the South Florida Sun Sentinel archives.
Miami-Dade County
Treon Johnson
- Date: Feb. 27, 2014
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint: Taser, pepper spray, prone position
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Excited delirium due to alpha-PVP use and schizophrenia; contributing cause of dog bites
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Police officers responded to a call about a man fighting with a dog in someone’s backyard. When they arrived, they found Treon Johnson, who began to run away. Officers shocked him twice, first in the chest and then in the back while he was lying on his stomach. After he was taken to the hospital, his condition began to deteriorate and he died. Johnson was on designer drugs at the time of his death. His autopsy says he had a history of schizophrenia but his family disputes this.
Michael Roque
- Date: March 20, 2014
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint: Prone position, struggle
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Excited Delirium Syndrome Associated with Cocaine and Alpha-pyrrolidinopentiophenone use
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Michael Roque had been using drugs for the past five days with little to no sleep. Officers responded to a call from neighbors about him having a verbal fight with his girlfriend. They handcuffed him in a seated position, but he became “combative” with police and fire rescue, so they placed him in a prone position during the “struggle.” He stopped breathing and was taken to the emergency room in cardiac arrest.
Timothy Vann
- Date: June 14, 2014
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint: Unclear
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Excited delirium due to acute cocaine toxicity
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Timothy Vann collapsed and began convulsing at his girlfriend’s home in June 2014. When police and Fire Rescue arrived, he seemed erratic, “shadow boxing” while they were there. Officers tried to handcuff him but only got one handcuff on before he became unresponsive, according to his autopsy. At the emergency room, he tested positive for cocaine.
William Jackson Jr.
- Date: Sept. 18, 2014
- Police interaction? No
- Use of force/restraint: Unclear
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Complications of Cocaine-Induced Excited Delirium and Coronary Vasospasm
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Jackson Jr. was at a mental health facility after being admitted involuntarily under the Baker Act. He had used drugs and complained of chest pain when Fire Rescue responded. He became “combative” with paramedics and then became unresponsive.
Alfredo Saldamando
- Date: March 1, 2015
- Police interaction? No
- Use of force/restraint: None
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Excited Delirium Syndrome due to Acute Ethylone and AB-CHMINACA Toxicity
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Saldamando’s landlord found him unresponsive in his home. When paramedics arrived, they pronounced him dead at the scene. Police said items were found knocked over and broken, and there was evidence of drug use. He appeared to have many injuries to his head, neck and torso, including broken ribs.
Maximo Rabasa
- Date: July 5, 2015
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint: Taser
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Cocaine Induced Excited Delirium
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: A Miami police officer saw Rabasa in the road, naked and armed with a knife. When he confronted Rabasa, Rabasa refused to comply with his demands, according to the autopsy, and the officer Tased him. He went into cardiac arrest while being transported to the emergency room.
Edwin Stuart
- Date: March 10, 2016
- Police interaction? No
- Use of force/restraint: None
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Acute Bupropion and CocaineToxicity (Excited Delirium Syndrome)
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Family members found Stuart at the threshold of his front door, lying in a pool of blood. Paramedics and police pronounced him dead. He had blunt injuries to the head and neck, and torso. He had eight intact pills in his stomach.
Todd Stamp
- Date: Aug. 6, 2016
- Police interaction? No
- Use of force/restraint: None
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Blunt Force Injuries
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Stamp was acting “bizarre” when he arrived at his condo the day he died, entering an elevator and pressing no buttons while dancing inside. Security helped him to his condo. He then jumped from his 8th floor balcony and died. Stamp tested positive for several drugs. He died by blunt force injuries, but excited delirium is listed as a contributory cause of death.
Aviel Gutierrez
- Date: Dec. 4, 2016
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint: Taser, Versed (sedative)
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Drug Induced Excited Delirium (Cocaine, Ethylone, Pentylone, N-Ethylpentylone, N,N-Dimethylpentylone)
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Gutierrez was having an altercation with his girlfriend in the middle of the street in the early hours of the morning when police responded. He was shocked with a Taser “an unknown number of times” and restrained by multiple officers, according to his autopsy report. He was restrained in a prone position and injected with 20 milligrams of Versed, twice the recommended dose.
Keith Wooten
- Date: Sept. 30, 2017
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint: Taser
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Cause of Death: Cocaine Induced Excited Delirium With Associated Physical Struggle
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Wooten was “acting weird” the day he died. Had jumped into a car wearing boxers. Police were called and he got out of the car and charged at them, so they shocked him with a Taser. He began barking like a dog and tried to bite officers, fighting with them until he was handcuffed, when he became unresponsive and was pronounced dead in the emergency room.
Carlos Ortiz
- Date: May 4, 2018
- Police interaction? No
- Use of force/restraint? None
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Excited Delirium Syndrome associated with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) Use
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Ortiz’s mother last saw him when said goodbye on his way out the door, wearing his Domino’s uniform. A security guard at a community with a lake then called Fire Rescue because he was running around shouting “Carlos” and acting strangely, then went into the lake. When Fire Rescue went into the lake, he was combative and uncooperative, trying to drown divers. Divers then brought him to shore, unconscious. He was pronounced dead at hospital.
Palm Beach County
Omar Stevens
- Date: July 17, 2019
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint? Taser, hobble restraint, prone position, kicked, punched, ketamine, spit hood
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Excited delirium and dehydration due to N-ethylpentylone toxicity (bath salts)
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Omar Stevens was having a paranoid episode. Police found him just after he crashed a car, and shocked him with a Taser multiple times during a several minutes-long fight with police before being restrained in a prone position. At some point after he was injected with ketamine, he no longer appeared to be breathing.
Craig Shumake Jr.
- Date: July 26, 2014
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint? Struggle, hobble
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Excited delirium due to alpha PVP toxicity while being restrained
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a call about a group of men fighting. Shumake had been knocking on strangers’ doors and was behind a nearby home, speaking nonsensically and drenched in sweat. Officers were handcuffing him when he started to resist. Multiple deputies struggled for several minutes to get him handcuffed and restrained with a hobble when he went limp and lost consciousness.
Paul T. Boehlke
- Date: July 31, 2018
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint? Unclear
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Excited delirium due to acute N-ethylpentylone toxicity
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Boehlke was running through the parking lot of a metal supply company in Lake Worth, shouting incoherently, sweating and taking off his clothes. Deputies arrived and found him lying on the ground, kicking and swinging his arms. They put him in a fetal position and handcuffed him. When paramedics started to treat him, he became unresponsive and was later pronounced dead in the hospital. Boehlke had a history of drug overdoses.
Brock Sypek
- Date: April 5, 2020
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint? Ketamine
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Sequelae of excited delirium with rhabdomyolysis due to combined toxicity of cocaine and fentanyl
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Police found Sypek in his bathtub with wounds to his throat. He had been using drugs after relapsing. His body temperature was extremely high, though he may have had COVID 19. He was ‘combative,’ and paramedics administered ketamine. He was taken to the hospital and placed on a ventilator, after which he died. He had previously cut his own arm while on drugs.
Joseph Zarlengo
- Date: Feb. 12, 2014
- Police interaction? No
- Use of force/restraint? None
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Excited delirium due to cocaine and hydromorphone intoxication.
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Zarlengo’s wife called 911 to report that he had collapsed in the bathroom of their home. He had a history of drug use, and later died in the emergency room.
Freddy Holmes
- Date: March 18, 2014
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint? None
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Excited delirium due to acute and chronic cocaine abuse
- Manner of death: Accident
- Summary: Holmes had been using crack cocaine and began ripping off his clothes and punching the walls of his home. West Palm Beach Police subdued him without force, according to the autopsy, and took him to the hospital, where he died. Holmes had previously shot up the walls of his own home in another incident.
Chad McKinney
- Date: Dec. 26, 2015
- Police interaction? No
- Use of force/restraint? None
- Race: White
- Cause of death: Excited delirium
- Manner of death: Undetermined
- Summary: McKinney was acting “strangely” and aggressive on Christmas Day, according to his autopsy. He was taken to the emergency room with difficulty breathing and a high temperature, and tested positive for Benzos and marijuana. He died the next day. The report says “no drug was detected in his blood that could explain his symptoms,” so his manner of death was undetermined.
Akeem Bernard
- Date: June 3, 2016
- Police interaction? Yes
- Use of force/restraint? None
- Race: Black
- Cause of death: Excited delirium
- Manner of death: Natural
- Summary: Bernard was pulled over by PBSO deputies for driving erratically. He was arrested for a DUI and handcuffed with his hands in front of him. His autopsy reports no use of physical control by deputies. He did not appear to be on any drugs, but had a high temperature and was agitated and combative when he became unresponsive at the emergency room. His organs began to fail and he died early the next morning.
SOURCE: Autopsy reports from the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office and Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office.
