July 18, 2008 11:46 pm
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By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
Joplin recently paid $5,000 to a 25-year-old black man to get him to drop any claims against the city and a white police officer who struck him in the face with an open-handed, martial-arts-type blow while the man was handcuffed and being dragged to a jail cell.
The incident took place at the city jail in the early morning hours of April 20 following the arrest of David G. Neal, 1717 Redbud Road, for allegedly ramming a police car with his own car in downtown Joplin and resisting arrest.
The officer involved, Homer Knisley, 31, left employment with the Joplin Police Department on Wednesday. His departure and the discipline of two other officers involved were disclosed Thursday in the wake of investigations by the department’s internal affairs division and the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Police Chief Lane Roberts said Friday that Knisley and other officers were reacting to extreme provocation by Neal the night in question.
“But the bottom line is: Even if everything (Knisley) says is true, you don’t punch a guy in handcuffs,” Roberts told the Globe. “There’s no way to justify it.”
The incident at the jail prompted a complaint from Neal’s mother the next day, and the local chapter of the NAACP expressed concerns a few days later, Roberts said. But the Police Department’s internal affairs division already had begun looking into the arrest and jailing of Neal before any complaints were received, he said.
“All of our actions were self-initiated,” Roberts said. “We were not forced to do any of the things we have done.”
He said what was done is that Knisley was taken off patrol immediately and placed on desk duty while the investigation proceeded. Once the internal investigation was completed, the matter was taken before the department’s disciplinary review board and a recommendation was made to him.
Roberts said the board’s recommendation is not a matter of public record since it entails a personnel matter. But he then placed Knisley on paid suspension pending the outcome of a fact-finding hearing, he said. That hearing was scheduled to take place Wednesday, but Roberts said Knisley left employment before the hearing.
The police chief said results of both investigations were turned over to the Jasper County prosecutor’s office, and the prosecutor declined to file charges against the officer. Roberts subsequently released a number of reports Friday related to officers’ use of force in arresting Neal and the incident at the jail.
Roberts also allowed the Globe to view two videos captured by the jail’s surveillance cameras. One video shows Neal arriving outside the jail in an officer’s car and struggling with Knisley, a second officer and a jailer as he is being taken inside. The second video from a camera inside the jail captures the blow in question that Knisley delivered to Neal.
In that video, Neal is seen being dragged from the booking room into an interior room of the jail on the way to lockup.
His wrists handcuffed behind him, Neal appears to be resisting a jailer who holds him under his right arm and Knisley who has him by the left arm. As they half-carry, half-pull him toward the doorway, his knees and lower legs drag along the floor.
Reaching the doorway, they momentarily jam together three abreast and the jailer slightly trips over the raised threshold, his left hand at Neal’s back inadvertently pushing Neal to the floor with the forward force of his stumble.
From a prone position on the floor, Neal turns his head toward the jailer crouched over him on his right. The jailer moves his right leg reflexively back and away from Neal’s face.
Knisley then leans over from behind Neal and delivers a blow to the right side of his face with the heel of his open right hand. The left side of Neal’s head bounces off the hard jail floor in reaction. A pool of blood slowly forms beneath his face.
Knisley places a hand on the right side of Neal’s head as if holding it toward the floor for a second or two. He then steps to the front of Neal and leans down into his face, as if telling him something, even as another police officer and female jail staff member enter the room and assist in taking the prisoner back out of the camera’s view toward a cell.
Neal was under arrest at the time on probable-cause charges of felony assault on an officer and numerous related misdemeanors. Cpl. Chuck Niess, of the Police Department, told the Globe that Officer Trevor Duncan tried to stop a car Neal was driving about 1 a.m. on April 20 in the 200 block of West Fifth Street for blocking the street. Neal drove up onto a curb and stopped, Niess said.
As Duncan prepared to get out of the vehicle and make contact with the driver, Neal allegedly put the car in reverse and rammed Duncan’s patrol car. He then reportedly drove forward into a pole.
The officer and Neal both got out of their vehicles at that point and Neal started toward Duncan, Niess said. The officer commanded him to stop, but he did not comply, Niess said. Duncan then attempted to use a Taser gun on him, but it failed when one of the prongs did not make contact with him.
But it stopped Neal’s approach, and Duncan thought that he might begin to comply, Niess said. But when he went up to Neal to gain control of him, he pulled away and started walking away, prompting a second use of Duncan’s Taser. The second use knocked him to the ground, and Duncan and a second officer who’d arrived on the scene, David Brewer, began trying to handcuff him, Niess said.
What followed was a protracted struggle in which Knisley became involved, according to Roberts. The struggle attracted the attention of a large crowd of people present in the bar district of the downtown, some of whom were making verbally antagonistic remarks toward the officers, he said. Other officers called to the scene were kept busy maintaining crowd control, he said.
He said the investigations showed that all the officers involved in the arrest, including Knisley, acted appropriately and did nothing wrong.
Included in reports released by Roberts is Knisley’s own report, in which he acknowledges delivering a total of four “hand strikes to the face” of Neal, two at the scene of the arrest and two outside the jail. But he does not acknowledge any such strike inside the jail.
Knisley states in his report that at one point during the arrest, Neal got his left arm free and was swinging it wildly. The open end of a pair of handcuffs that had been snapped on the arm was striking Knisley, knocking off his glasses and ripping his badge from his uniform, he reported.
“I was unable to gain control of the suspect’s arms and I desired greatly that he stopped hitting me on the face with the handcuffs,” he wrote. “I gave the suspect two hard hand strikes to the face in an attempt to gain compliance from the suspect because up to this point in the encounter, nothing else had been effective.”
He further acknowledges that he used pepper spray on Neal after he was handcuffed because he was tensing his body and refusing to cooperate in being placed in a patrol car. He also acknowledges that several “knee strikes” were delivered to Neal, although he does not report if he or some other officer delivered them.
Neal eventually was placed in the back of Brewer’s car and transported to the jail, with Knisley following in his patrol car because of the combativeness of Neal. Outside the jail, as he was being removed from Brewer’s car, Neal managed to grab Knisley by his thigh and inflict severe pain, according to Knisley’s report. He wrote that he gave Neal two more hand strikes to the face to get him to let go.
Knisley also states in his report that Neal was trying to spit on officers. Of the moments caught on camera inside the jail, he wrote: “Once we entered the jail, the suspect spit at jailer Bobby. I turned the suspect’s face down to keep him from spitting at officers.”
Knisley initially indicated to the Globe on Friday that he would be willing to comment. But his attorney, Wes Barnum, subsequently contacted the newspaper and said they would not be making any statements until Monday at the earliest.
The names of the other officers involved and the disciplinary measures taken have not been made public. Roberts said they were disciplined for not reporting what they knew of the incident at the jail to their supervisors.
Roberts referred questions about the terms of the city’s settlement with Neal and his attorney, Judd McPherson, to the city attorney and McPherson. McPherson declined to discuss the terms, but Assistant City Attorney Peter Edwards noted the amount of the settlement as $5,000.
Edwards said the settlement was reached last week. He said Neal gave full release to the city and Knisley for any claims arising from his arrest and what happened at the jail. No lawsuit had been filed, he said.
“The city saw a situation where we had liability, and we tried to take care of it early,” Edwards said.
Besides felony assault and misdemeanor resisting, Neal was charged with misdemeanors of obstruction of traffic, driving on a sidewalk, improper plates, property damage, driving without insurance and assault on the jailer. The felony assault on Duncan is still pending.
Prosecutor Dean Dankelson was out of his office on Friday and could not be reached for comment on why no charge was filed against Knisley.
Sgt. Matt Stewart, of the internal affairs division of the Police Department, said the investigation showed that Taser guns were used on Neal eight times over the course of his arrest and jailing. But he and the police chief said the investigations showed officers acted appropriately in the use of those Tasers and in other measures taken to get Neal into custody at the scene of the arrest.
Roberts said the NAACP contacted the department within a week of the incident and expressed concern. He said the department met with members of the chapter to explain that an investigation was in progress and to explain the procedures and policies governing officers’ use of Taser guns.
Ruthie Cox, president of the local chapter, told the Globe that members “felt treated well and given good answers.” She said the chapter believes Joplin police did the right thing calling in an outside agency to investigate the matter.
“If this had been done within the system alone, there could have been bias,” she said.
Editor Carol Stark and staff writer Debby Woodin contributed to this report.
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