CHULA VISTA — Chula Vista police have released edited body-worn camera footage from a confrontation with a Black Manteca trucking company owner who died last year after being placed in a full-body restraining device, but key portions of the encounter remain missing from the video record.
The Police Department, which released the footage Friday night, claimed one officer’s body-worn camera malfunctioned, and another’s was inadvertently turned off during a physical struggle with 56-year-old Oral Nunis Sr., who owned a small trucking company named Exclusive Transportation in Manteca and was in town visiting a daughter.
The March 13, 2020, death of the Jamaican immigrant is the subject of at least two wrongful death lawsuits against Chula Vista police being litigated in San Diego Superior Court, one filed on behalf of his widow, Roxie Nunis, and daughter Naomi Nunis, both of Manteca, and two other children. A second federal suit was filed by civil rights attorney John Burris, whose past clients include Rodney King and who earlier this year filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Stockton and Stockton police on behalf of Lincoln High School senior Devin Carter over an assault in December. Burris has represented several other Stockton and San Joaquin County families in similar cases.
Family allege that Nunis died as a direct result of excessive force used by the officers after he begged them not to handcuff him while sitting on a floor.
The gaps in the footage occur when police claim Nunis was “agitated” and “violently” resisting attempts to restrain him, the department indicates in the bodycam video.
The Police Department said in a statement Friday night that “all available body-worn camera footage has already been provided to the Nunis family and their lawyers.”
Police Chief Roxana Kennedy called Nunis’ death “an extremely sad and disturbing event” in a written statement. In a video statement, Kennedy repeatedly referred to Nunis as being violent and “irrational,” and “aggressively” resisting the efforts of officers to detain him. She claimed this occurred during the portions of the incident that were not recorded.
According to police, the Medical Examiner’s Office did not turn over Nunis’ medical report until May, about 14 months after his death.
In a written statement on the video that refers to the medical examiner as the county coroner, police said: “After an unusually lengthy investigation by the county coroner, Mr. Nunis’ cause of death is listed as cardiac arrest of an undetermined manner that appears to have been caused by excited delirium. The coroner also noted that Mr. Nunis had a history of anxiety and high blood pressure.”
According to Kennedy, who speaks for about three minutes at the start of the edited footage, Nunis’ daughter took him to a hospital March 12 because he was “showing signs of anxiety and a mental crisis.” The hospital released him that same day “despite finding some unusual heart problems and chest pains.”
Just before midnight that same day, the daughter called 911, saying her boyfriend was holding down her father because he was trying to jump from a second-story window. In December, Nunis’ daughter Kimone Nunis told The San Diego Union-Tribune that she and her boyfriend were able to calm her father down by the time the officer arrived.
In the video, the officer — identified only as Agent Linney, with no first name provided — immediately pulls out handcuffs. Nunis and his daughter, seated on the carpeted floor in an upstairs doorway, both beg the officer not to handcuff him.
“No, no, no, I will come with you, no handcuffs, please,” Nunis tells the officer, who responds by telling him, “You have to go in handcuffs.”
Linney tells Nunis he’s not in trouble, but Nunis continues to beg the officer not to handcuff him, telling Linney again he’ll go with him.
In her video statement, Kennedy said the officer was “following procedures that are intended to protect people who are suffering from mental health crises from hurting themselves or others.”
It is around this time that Linney’s body-worn camera allegedly stops working. In a written statement on the video, the Police Department said: “Axon, the body-worn camera manufacturer, conducted an extensive analysis and review of the device and determined that the interrupted video was a result of an internal malfunction.”
Kennedy describes in the video what allegedly happened next. She says Nunis became “more agitated” even as Linney “backed away and tried to de-escalate the situation by calm dialogue.” Kennedy says that Nunis then moved toward the stairs and was in an “irrational and unpredictable state.” She says because of this, and Nunis’ earlier attempt to jump from the window, Linney “moved to try to restrain Mr. Nunis.”
According to the chief, Nunis — described by his family’s lawyer as being 5 feet 4 inches, 145 pounds — broke free and ran outside. “In response, our officer tackled Mr. Nunis and tried to restrain him again,” Kennedy says in the video. “However, despite his age and size, he was able to violently resist the solo officer’s attempts to restrain him.”
Later, after paramedics arrive, Linney can be heard in one video describing to a paramedic what happened. “When I got here he fought with me, ran away, fell down several times,” Linney says. “I tackled him hard in the street (and) he’s fighting with all of us.”
The edited police footage did not show this portion of the encounter. It picks up with a second officer — identified only as Officer Padilla — running to where Linney is on top of Nunis in the street. The video shows just a few seconds of the officers roughly rolling Nunis from his back to his stomach before Padilla’s camera also stops recording.
According to police, it was bumped during the struggle and turned off, causing a roughly one-minute gap in the recording. When it once again begins to record, the first 30 seconds contains no audio. In the footage, Padilla appears to be on top of Nunis and restraining him, while Kimone Nunis’ hand is visible stroking her father’s face as he speaks.
Once the video activates, Nunis is heard shouting to his daughter: “May the good Lord bless you, I’m going to heaven.”
Moments later, Padilla’s camera shows the officers rolling Nunis from his back to his front and handcuffing his arms behind his back. Nunis asks where the paramedics are, then tells his daughter: “Kim, you cannot do this to daddy.”
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Video from a third officer — identified only as Officer Olson, with no first name given — shows either Linney or Padilla kneeling on Nunis’ left shoulder for 20 seconds as the other two officers pull an item from his pocket. Nunis is on his right hip, but with his upper body toward the ground, while the officer kneels on him. Footage later shows Olson applying pressure with two hands to Nunis’ back as the man lies in a similar position, partly on his side and partly facing toward the ground.
As more officers arrive, they begin to put him in a device known as The WRAP — a restraint system that uses a stiff blanket to immobilize a person’s legs, and a strap between the chest and ankles to keep the person upright and breathing. As they do so, Olson and other officers pry from Nunis’ handcuffed hands what appears to be a prescription pill bottle.
After placing Nunis in The WRAP and sitting him upright, an officer prepares to place a mesh spit hood over his head. “Don’t do that,” his daughter says. “I don’t appreciate that.”
The officers tell her they’re doing it so that he doesn’t spit — police have not alleged that Nunis tried to spit — but say that he can still breathe with it on. In her video statement, Kennedy says they put the spit hood on him “in order to reduce potential transmission of communicable diseases at the onset of the COVID pandemic.”
According to police, Nunis remained conscious, breathing and verbal after being restrained.
“He was then moved to an ambulance under the care of paramedics,” Kennedy says in her video statement. “A short time later, when Mr. Nunis was in the ambulance, paramedics notified officers that Mr. Nunis had stopped breathing.”
He died shortly thereafter at a hospital.
According to one of the lawsuits, filed by attorney Carl Douglas, officers failed to follow their training to deal with a person in mental distress.
“This lawsuit concerns the outrageous, careless, and unlawful use of deadly force by city officers, as well as their malicious effort to distort the true facts of their own misconduct,” the complaint states. “In addition, this case raises questions concerning the proper use of the ‘wrap,’ the latest in a line of law enforcement weaponry that directly led to Mr. Nunis’ death.”
Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that officers “negligently, carelessly, and mistakenly attempted to detain Mr. Nunis by pushing his small-framed body against the asphalt using their collective body weight.”
It alleges that “the collective weight of the Defendants on Mr. Nunis’ chest and upper body was a substantial factor causing his heart to begin beating frantically as Mr. Nunis struggled to breathe.”
Last year, USA TODAY examined 32 fatal police encounters since 2010 in which victims said they couldn’t breathe while being restrained. At least 134 people have died in police custody from “asphyxia/restraint” in the past decade alone, even though many apparently did not — or could not — express difficulty breathing, according to a review of Fatal Encounters, a searchable database of people who died while interacting with police.
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USA TODAY examined at least seven other cases in which people told officers they couldn’t breathe before dying of asphyxiation. A controversial condition called “excited delirium syndrome” is often cited in such deaths; it is disputed by many experts who say it’s not real and should not be in use.
“As the term has been used particularly in defense of sudden deaths occurring when someone has been shot by a TASER, my personal bias is that it’s a lot of bunk and that it does not exist,” Douglas Zipes, a professor of medicine at Indiana University, told USA Today. “It’s thrown around far too frequently in my research of it and is used as an excuse to explain mechanism of death.”
A statement from Chula Vista police Friday said no further comment would be provided by department officials due to the pending litigation.
The San Diego Union Tribune, USA Today and Stockton Record archives contributed to this report.
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