MADISON, Wis. (news agencies) — Prosecutors in Milwaukee have charged four hotel workers with being a party to D’Vontaye Mitchell’s murder after scouring video showing them piling on top of the Black man in an incident Mitchell’s family says is disturbingly similar to George Floyd’s death.
Mitchell’s family spent weeks pressuring prosecutors to charge the hotel workers in the June 30 death. District Attorney John Chisholm finally filed a count of being a party to felony murder against each of them on Tuesday.
Here’s what to know about Mitchell’s death and the Hyatt workers, who now face sentences of up to nearly 16 years in prison if they’re convicted.
The criminal complaint charging the hotel workers offers a detailed account of the last moments of Mitchell’s life based on Hyatt surveillance footage, witness accounts and a bystander’s video.
Surveillance video shows Mitchell running through the downtown high-rise hotel’s lobby on the afternoon of June 30, according to the complaint. He enters the gift shop and then the women’s bathroom.
Two women who were in the bathroom later told investigators that Mitchell tried to lock them in the bathroom. One woman said she told him to let her out but he refused. She was eventually able to push past him.
Video shows off-duty Hyatt security guard Brandon Turner dragging Mitchell out of the bathroom. He and a hotel guest then get into a scuffle with Mitchell and drag him across the lobby, through the foyer and out into the hotel driveway. At one point Turner punches Mitchell six times.
Once outside, the hotel guest returns to the building but on-duty security guard Todd Erickson, bellhop Herbert Williamson and front desk worker Devin Johnson-Carson help Turner hold Mitchell down on his stomach for what the complaint says was eight to nine minutes.
Johnson-Carson would later tell detectives he heard Mitchell groaning and saying “stop” and “why?” and something about breathing. Erickson told Mitchell that “I don’t want to hear that,” followed by a profanity. Johnson-Carson also said Erickson struck Mitchell with a baton.
Williamson told investigators he put his knee on the middle of Mitchell’s back, adding that Mitchell was strong, wouldn’t calm down and tried to bite Erickson. Mitchell kept asking what he did wrong, Williamson said.
A bystander’s video of the incident caught Mitchell yelling “please” and “I’m sorry” while breathing heavily. Erickson turns to the camera and says: “This is what happens when you go into the ladies’ room.”
By the time police and emergency responders arrived Mitchell had stopped moving, the complaint said.
The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Mitchell was morbidly obese and suffered from heart disease, according to the complaint, and had cocaine and methamphetamine in his system.
After watching video of the incident, Assistant Medical Examiner Lauren Decker determined that Mitchell suffered “restraint asphyxia” from the workers holding down his legs, arms, back and head. In other words, they prevented Mitchell from breathing.
Decker said Mitchell might have lived had the workers moved him to his side. The medical examiner’s office classified the manner of death as homicide on Friday.
Mitchell’s family began drawing comparisons of his death to Floyd, who died in 2020 after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. The death of Floyd, who was Black, sparked a national reckoning on race relations.
Mitchell’s family began pressuring Chisholm to file charges against the Hyatt employees. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime civil rights activist, delivered the elegy at Mitchell’s funeral. The family hired Ben Crump, a noted civil rights attorney who represented Floyd’s family.
“Everybody in America, after George Floyd, should have trained their employees, especially security personnel, to not put knees on peoples’ backs and peoples’ necks,” Crump told reporters in July.
Chisholm’s office said it was reviewing the case as a homicide but was waiting for full autopsy results. The criminal complaint concludes with a rare explanation of prosecutors’ rationale for the charges, saying that the four employees’ impaired Mitchell’s breathing due to his weight and drug consumption and they knew it.
“The actions and words of DM, the distress that he was in, show that all four Defendants were aware that holding DM face first on the ground was ‘practically certain’ to cause ‘impairment of his physical condition,’” the complaint says.
American Dollar Exchange Rate