Police officers dragged a handcuffed Bobby Joe Rylee by his arms into the Pope County Detention Center after Rylee said that he couldn’t feel his legs and that his back and legs were broken, according to a jailer who helped pull Rylee inside.
The jailer, Chris Ketcherside, was among 29 witnesses interviewed by the Russellville Police Department and the Pope County sheriff’s office as part of an investigation into the July 15 arrest of Rylee, who reportedly fought with arresting officers. He died five days later in a Little Rock hospital.
The jailer’s statement is part of a voluminous case file about Rylee’s arrest and its fatal consequences, obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette under a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Arkansas medical examiner’s office and Prosecuting Attorney David Gibbons of Clarksville have said Rylee suffered a broken neck with spinal-cord injury, fractured ribs and a puncture to the diaphragm and left lung.
Rylee was injured during a parking-lot struggle with Russellville police about 1: 30 a. m. after officers said he refused to get out of his vehicle and struggled with them, stabbing one officer in the arm with a ballpoint pen. Gibbons, concluding that the pen was a deadly weapon, said in August that the police were justified in the force used to subdue the 5-foot-11, 170-pound Rylee.
According to the case file, Ketcherside said in an interview with sheriff’s office Lt. Aaron DuVall that Rylee was asked to stand up after he was taken inside the jail, but Rylee “said he couldn’t feel his legs, said his back was broke, his legs was broke and he couldn’t stand up.” Asked if he had checked to see if Rylee’s back or legs were broken, Ketcherside said he had not.
The case file says Rylee arrived at the jail’s booking area at 1: 41 a. m. on a “felony hold” pending charges of second-degree battery, resisting arrest, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct and careless or prohibited driving.
Officers placed the 61-yearold Rylee on his stomach on the floor, Ketcherside said. About five to 10 minutes later, the jailer said, he asked Rylee how he was feeling.
“He said he was doing fine,” Ketcherside told DuVall. Ketcherside said Rylee asked, and received permission, to move his hands, which were “flat out behind him.” Rylee had “a big bump and a gash” along with “a little bit of blood” on one ear, ” the jailer said. Asked if Rylee ever asked to go to the hospital, Ketcherside replied, “No sir, he denied going to the hospital.”
“DIDN’T LOOK NORMAL” Later that morning — about 3: 30 a. m., police Chief James Bacon has indicated — Russellville police Sgt. Keith Spears went to the jail to photograph Rylee. (The chief has said this is routine whenever suspects fight with police. ) Spears said in his statement for the investigation that, when he arrived, Rylee was still “lying there on his face, face down on the floor.”
“I turned to these guys and said has he been like this all night ?” Spears said, according to a transcript of his statement. “Is that where you left him ? And one of the jailers said yeah I think so. I was like g uys that ain’t very good. I said if he’s been there two hours he should be stirring ya know.”
Spears said Rylee talked normally and could move his arms. But, he said, when he asked Rylee to roll over for a couple of pictures, “the jailers had to actually assist him to roll over.” Further, Spears said, he noticed that Rylee’s feet crossed when he was turned over.
“It didn’t look normal,” he said.
Spears recalled suggesting to jail supervisor Luke Sawdy that someone ask emergency medical technicians to check out Rylee to “see if he’s got any feeling in his toes or if he can do something.”
“I said they’ve got the medical know-how to know if he’s playing with us or not.”
Spears said he left the jail and later learned that emergency medical technicians were subsequently called, but Rylee had refused treatment.
Ketcherside, who had worked for the sheriff ’s office more than two years, told of getting no response from Rylee after he’d been placed in a wheelchair.
“Me and Corporal Sawdy walked by and he wasn’t making no noises, he was just laying there, and we hit the bottom of his foot and asked him if he was all right. He never said anything but his, you could tell he was breathing, he was breathing good, his chest was moving quite a bit.”
Ketcherside was asked if it’s normal to try to talk with someone in the jail and not get a response.
He said it was, adding, “Drunks, uh, people on drugs come in, most of the time they’re messed up anyway, always complaining about their backs or legs hurting.”
Michael Floyd, who was working the graveyard shift at the jail that morning, told Du-Vall that when he saw Rylee entering the lockup, he “seemed like just a regular drunk that would come in.”
In an interview this month with the Democrat-Gazette, Sheriff Jay Winters said Rylee did not seem to be in a potentially life-threatening situation for most of the roughly seven hours he was at the jail.
“What it appeared was like somebody who was very sleepy or who was intoxicated,” the sheriff said. “A lot of his actions were consistent with somebody who is intoxicated either on alcohol, drugs or both.”
(The case file offers no indication that Rylee had been drinking or using drugs. )
“We had no idea his injuries were going to turn out to be like they were,” Winters said. “Once we realized they were, once we felt like there was a problem, we got assistance. Then, that was turned down, but once it became obvious he could not make that decision, we got assistance again.”
Winters said that if Rylee had “been bleeding profusely and said ‘I don’t want to go to the doctor,’ we’re going to take them anyway.” In this case, though, Rylee had an abrasion and some blood on an ear, the sheriff said.
“But it was not a gaping wound.... It was more of a scrape.”
On Monday, Rylee’s family filed a federal court lawsuit accusing Russellville police officers of brutally beating Rylee and county jail officers of refusing him medical treatment.
According to the case file, Sawdy, the jail supervisor, told DuVall that he had asked Rylee numerous times if he was in pain and Rylee had replied, no, that he was fine and that the only thing wrong was he couldn’t feel his feet. At another point, though, Sawdy said Rylee indicated that his back was hurting.
After Rylee had spent about three hours in an isolation cell, Sawdy said, he and another officer decided to put Rylee into a wheelchair and move him to the booking area where he could be more closely watched. He recalled Rylee said that his back was hurting and that he couldn’t pick himself up. Sawdy said he later asked Rylee if he had any pain, and Rylee said no, that he didn’t need medical attention.
“Did you ever ask that he be taken to a doctor or clinic or emergency room ?” DuVall asked.
“No, sir,” Sawdy replied.
“We held his head up”
About 4: 30 a. m., Sawdy called emergency medical technicians after Rylee kept complaining about his feet and back. According to Sawdy’s statement, two men responded to the call, “asked him how his back was feeling, uh, checked his blood pressure, rubbed the back of his neck. When they touched the back of his neck, he said that the back of his neck was hurtin’. Uh, they asked him if... he needed to see a doctor or be taken to the hospital and he said ‘no.’ After he said ‘no,’ they took their stuff and left.”
Ketcherside said he and Sawdy went over to Rylee shortly after 7: 30 a. m. and noticed Rylee’s head tilted down toward his chest.
“We held his head up and he said he couldn’t breathe, and so we told him to hold his head up, we kind of let go of it and his head started to fall down again,” Ketcherside said. “So we held his head up, told him that he needed to hold his head up, and he said he couldn’t, so we took and pulled him back out of the chair and laid him backwards [in the wheelchair ] so his head would be held up.”
Chuck Phillips, a shift supervisor at the jail, told DuVall that Rylee appeared to be asleep in the wheelchair when he came to work just before 8 a. m. But, about 8: 30 a. m., Phillips said he noticed Rylee was not breathing and had booking officers contact emergency medical technicians, who took Rylee to the hospital.
Winters said his officers acted properly.
“There was not anything... to indicate there was a problem there,” he said.
Chief Bacon has said in a previous interview that Rylee was alert when police left him at the jail, and Bacon has noted that Rylee declined medical treatment.
There was “nothing that brought anyone’s attention that he need immediate medical attention,” Bacon has said.
Gibbons has said he understood that the FBI was investigating the case. Reached by telephone Friday in Little Rock, FBI spokesman Steven K. Frazier said: “The Department of Justice and the FBI have a policy against commenting about civil-rights investigations. Therefore, I can’t comment on this specific one.”
David Underwood, coordinator of the Arkansas Criminal Detention Facilities Review Committees, which oversee jail standards for the state, likened the responsibility that police assume when they arrest someone to that of being parents.
“When you arrest somebody, you immediately become their mother and father,” he told the Democrat-Gazette. “You’re totally responsible for their care because you have taken away their ability to fend for themselves. “ That’s not written in the law. But it’s very obvious.”
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