- The guy passed a counterfeit bill. The police were called.
- He gave the cops a hard time, and had to be wrestled out of his vehicle in cuffs.
- He emptied his pockets of what look like bags of drugs, which can be seen in that video.
- With no one even touching him, he started complaining that he "can't [couldn't] breath"; cops deal with excuses like this on a daily basis ("I have to go to the bathroom!").
- The cops struggled trying to get him to stay in the police car; it required three officers.
- Apparently due to his continuing complaints and combativeness, they pulled him out of the car, called an ambulance, and pinned him down while waiting; he's a big dude and had been giving them a tough time, so the cop used a common method in which they are trained.
- While pinned, he continued to complain that he "can't [couldn't] breath"; having heard that excuse earlier in a context in which it made no sense, they dismissed him: "you're talking fine".
- When he stopped moving, they checked for a pulse and couldn't find one. The ambulance arrived, and the guy was pronounced dead at the hospital.
- The autopsy preliminarily revealed that he died from a combination of underlying medical conditions, and some combination of "intoxicants" in his system.
- The official, follow-up toxicology report confirmed that the guy died from cardiopulmonary arrest, induced by Fentanyl and methamphetamine in his blood system, combined with arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease.
- A break-down of and link to the full autopsy can be read via this post. It found dangerous levels of Fetayl, and no injuries whatever to the neck.
By now, everyone knows I am not a fan of American cops, to say the least. One can find numerous "police brutality" montages on YouTube, with virtually no effort-- with many of them documenting the deaths of white men.
But that said and as more facts emerged, this started to look less and less like yet another of those examples-- to the point where the only real fault I can find is that the cops didn't attempt CPR when they noticed the guy had no pulse. Or to put it another way and illustrating the principle, if the police arrest someone with significant cardiovascular problems and who is jacked up on drugs, and the person has a heart attack while detained, that doesn't seem like murder to me.
As such, burning down entire city blocks, virtue signalling with ridiculous signs, Sony delaying events and so forth seem completely misaligned with what we know so far-- I don't see virtually anyone else revising their positions to match the facts, as I am continually doing.
It's all emotion and political opportunism: little else.