This Father Told Bystanders ‘They’re Gonna Kill Me,’ Then Cops Tasered Him To Death

As 39-year-old father of two Calvon Reid was beaten by police, hit by a stun gun, and in fear for his life, eyewitnesses claim he looked at them and said “They’re going to kill me.” Shortly afterwards, he lost consciousness. Two days later, he died of his injuries.

The police force in Coconut Creek, Miami then kept his death a secret, refusing to issue a press release about the incident. When reporters contacted city officials to investigate rumors of the death, the city claimed everything associated with the case was “confidential.”

The tragic events of February 22. began with a heavily-injured Reid, his clothes torn and bloody, arriving at the gated retirement community of Wynmoor at around 1am. He approached resident Perry Weiss in the parking lot.

“He came over to me and asked me, ‘Will you take me to the hospital?’” Weiss recalled. When a nervous Weiss declined. “He said, ‘Okay, will you call 911 for me?’ I said, ‘Certainly, no problem.’”

Weiss called Reid an ambulance, and went to leave.

“He said to me, ‘Will you stay with me?’ I said, ‘No, I can’t, somebody’s waiting for me,’” says Weiss.

Weiss left him in the parking lot, without asking him why or how he was injured.

Fellow resident Wendy Ritter was at home with her boyfriend Marc Lamorte when they heard screams coming from the parking lot shortly after.

“It was screaming, screaming like somebody was being beat,” Lamorte said.

The couple went outside and saw Reid on his stomach on the ground, hands shackled behind his back, surrounded by four officers.

“He said, ‘They’re gonna kill me! They’re gonna kill me!’” she said. “In my wildest imagination I didn’t believe he would die.”

Police asked if they knew Reid, and when they answered in the negative, they were ordered away from the scene. They went upstairs but continued to watch the scenes unfold.

“One of the cops says something to him and socks him,” says Lamorte. “He hit him. Just bam. This guy was no threat to anybody, he was on the ground. He was tied. There’s something wrong here.”

After that, “It got very quiet,” Ritter said.

Another resident, Bonnie Eshleman, testified in a sworn affidavit that she saw four officers surround Reid and pin him to the ground. While he lay prone, one officer threatened to break his arm while another hit him with a stick or baton. She remembers seeing Reid cry out to an unidentified woman stood about 25 yards away (likely Ritter):

“Baby, baby, baby, help, they’re gonna kill me!”

Eshelman states that she saw two officers drag Reid to his feet. Then, according to her testimony, the other two officers simultaneously shot him with stun guns from a distance no greater than 10 feet. They threw him face down onto the grass afterwards and she heard Reid call (for the second time) “I can’t breathe!”

At this point, Reid stopped moving and Eshelman heard officers call in paramedics. She said:

“After the paramedics stopped performing CPR on Mr. Reid they displayed no urgency transferring him to a gurney and they casually rolled him away to their ambulance .When they departed the scene, they slowly drove away and didn’t turn on their flashing overhead lights.”

We do not yet know if more urgent medical attention could have saved Reid’s life. What we do know is that he was alive when paramedics placed him on the gurney, and he did not die until February 24.

Then came the alleged cover-up.

According to the Sun Sentinel:

Days after Reid’s death, city and police officials refused to acknowledge that the incident even occurred. The Sun Sentinel confirmed the death through public records from the Medical Examiner’s Office. His family said police told them he was stunned three times. Michael Mann, the former police chief, first spoke publicly of the incident more than a week after it happened.

When police finally came clean about the death, they told the press that they used the 50,000 volt stun guns on Reid because he was being “aggressive.” However, Eshelman and her fellow witnesses refute this version of events. She says it was the police who behaved in a physically and verbally aggressive way.

“It appeared Mr. Reid just wanted to be left alone,” she said.

Weiss agrees, and now regrets leaving Reid on his own that night. He said:

“He was calm, he was pleasant, he didn’t argue. He wasn’t looking to do any harm to me, he needed help. He didn’t get wild or noisy.

Maybe I should have stayed with him.”

Calvin Reid’s father is also skeptical about the version of events given by police.

“I really don’t buy any of this,” he told the Miami Herald. “We don’t know the cause of death. We don’t know why he was there…We couldn’t talk to the doctors at the hospital. There are so many unanswered questions.”

Less than a week after publicly declaring that there was “no cover up,” Police Chief Michael Mann was forced to stand down, and three of the officers involved have been put on desk duty while an investigation is launched. According to records obtained by the Sentinel, Taser certifications had expired for three of the four officers on the scene.

This seemingly totally unnecessary death is yet another in a long line of questionable practices carried out under the stewardship of Michael Mann. One month before Reid’s death, not-for-profit news organization FloridaBulldog.org (who were first to raise concerns about Reid) reported that between 2010 and 2012 Coconut Creek police botched 82 criminal cases involving reports of child abuse — sexual and otherwise — and alleged neglect or exploitation of seniors. While senior officers like Mann have been allowed to resign, there has been no criminal accountability for this litany of failure.