Quote:
Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen
A couple things. First, the anonymous other prisoner never saw anything. He heard banging on the wall.
Far more importantly, the prisoner was the third stop the police made while transporting Gray by the police's own admission. The first, according to the police, was to put him in leg irons for being irate. The second time they found him on the floor requesting medical attention. This is before the other prisoner was even picked up.
Not during the initial arrest or three subsequent stops was Freddie Gray properly restrained. If the narrative the police want to construct is that Freddie Gray severed his own spine, they still completely failed to follow the mandate to restrain him with a seatbelt. He was in their custody, they absolutely have a duty to provide reasonable protection to the individuals in their custody - even if it means from themselves. They failed. Completely. Even under the best circumstances they are still responsible and every protester has a right to be furious. Under no circumstances would I condone the violence and rioting though.
And while I'm all for the waiting for evidence approach, if we're jumping to conclusions the far more obvious one is that this was a nickel ride and not the case of someone severing his own spine as a #### you to the cops. Maybe you can accidentally forget to restrain a person the first time, when you have to stop multiple times and at one point he's on the floor requesting medical attention the very least you can do is put the damn seatbelt on him.
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I am not disagreeing with a lot of what you are saying here, and I do believe there is also the possibility they were slamming on the brakes to rough him up as well. But the prisoners did not indicate that.
There is however, a lot of facts being omitted from both sides.
The seatbelt mandate was literally 3 days old, and delivered to the officers via an email. It is very likely many of these officers ignored the email or simply had not gotten around to reading it yet. It is unlikely it was a malicious over sight.
And also I am not insinuating he purposely broke his neck. I think there could be a high likelihood, he may have tried to hurt himself, and somehow managed to go way too far, being it the combined movement of the van, or as others have said, possibly aggravating an pre-existing injury from a car accident apparently he was in days earlier. Broken spines are weird. I fractured a vertebrae in my back when I was 16, kept playing hockey for 2 weeks, and finally a made it to the doctor when I couldn't get out of bed one morning.
So who really knows what extreme or obscure events ended up contributing to his death. At the end of the day, unless there was a camera in that van, nobody will no for sure.