After learning what caused Marvin Scott III’s death, we are neither comforted nor confident that the case is being handled well. In fact, judging by Collin County Medical Examiner Dr. William Rohr’s report, things have been badly mishandled from the start.
Scott is the man who died in custody at the Collin County jail March 14. He was 26. Rohr’s report, released April 28, said the cause of death was “fatal acute stress response in an individual with previously diagnosed schizophrenia during restraint struggle with law enforcement.” The manner of death was listed as homicide.
To state the obvious: Police custody should be where homicides are prevented, not committed. This homicide happened in a secure area, under the control of law enforcement, to a person carrying no weapon and charged with no violent crime. Under those circumstances, the last thing that should happen is homicide. This is an abject failure on the part of the officers charged with Scott’s care.
Beyond that obvious point, there is still much to sort out in this case. According to news reports, Scott’s treatment involved pepper spray, forcible restraint, a pressure point, and something called a spit hood. But we don’t know why officers thought all those measures were necessary. Was Scott a threat to himself or others? Had he hurt anyone? We don’t know.
Just as important: What are the rules in the Collin County jail that govern the use of those measures? We don’t know.
Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner fired seven detention officers saying, “Evidence I have seen confirms that these detention officers violated well-established Sheriff’s Office policies and procedures.” What policies were violated? And how? We don’t know.
What we do know is that it’s not too much to expect jails to know how to deal with people suffering from stress and mental illness. According to the University of Texas Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, more than half of all adults incarcerated in prisons and jails across the country have at least one mental health condition. This was surely not the first time a troubled person had been booked into the Collin County jail. Detainment officers should know how to prevent cases from escalating like this one did.
We know now that Scott would not have died apart from the actions of law enforcement officers. That, after all, is what homicide means. And we also know that Skinner won’t release or confirm the names of the jailers who were fired. (Though we do have a list of names of people who may be the jailers who were let go thanks to the investigative work of this paper’s news staff.) We also know the sheriff hasn’t released video of the incident publicly, though last week Scott’s family and attorneys got to see it.
Actions like these are the kind of things that feed suspicion of law enforcement. When a homicide happens in police custody, that ups the ante. Transparency is even more important now.
Marvin Scott’s parents have a right to know why their son died. The public has a right to know where things broke down. And the Collin County Sheriff’s Department has a responsibility to do better.
