“Herman needed help.”
Daniel Cicchini, chief trial deputy prosecutor for the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, repeated the phrase three times in his opening statement to the jury Dec. 2. He hoped they would remember Herman Whitfield III not as someone ignoring police officers but as someone who was experiencing a mental health crisis.
Whitfield III, 39, died after being shocked with a Taser and restrained by police in his parents’ home in the early morning hours of April 25, 2022, after his mother called 911.
After an investigation, a grand jury indicted Adam Ahmad and Steven Sanchez, two of the six police officers who responded to the 911 call. The officers, who maintain their innocence, were charged with involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide and battery in connection with Whitfield’s death.
Remembered by family and friends as a gifted musician, Whitfield’s death reignited conversations around how police should — or shouldn’t — respond to mental health crises and about the treatment of Black men by police. While the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has Mobile Crisis Assistance Teams that respond to mental health calls, none were on duty during Whitfield’s crisis.
The Marion County Coroner’s Office determined that Whitfield died by homicide as a result of heart failure while under police restraint. At the crux of the trial is whether the officers acted recklessly in such a way that resulted in Whitfield’s death.
That’s the idea that Cicchini tried to get across on the first day of trial.
He described to the jury how Whitfield ran through the kitchen and into the living room, where he was met by Sanchez, who deployed his Taser twice at the man running toward him.
After Whitfield went down, the officers turned him and placed him on his stomach. They needed two sets of handcuffs to restrain him due to his large frame. The officers kept Whitfield in that prone position for too long, causing him to suffocate, Cicchini told the jury. He said they were waiting for the medics to arrive.
“He didn’t have a pulse when (the medics) came in, and he didn’t regain it,” Cicchini said before asking the jury to find Ahmad and Sanchez guilty of all charges.
Defense says no crimes were committed
“Objectively reasonable” was the phrase that P. Mason Riley, an attorney for the defense, chose to repeat in his opening remarks to jurors.
“Officers Ahmad and Sanchez went to the Whitfield home to help Herman Whitfield III, to get him into an ambulance, to get him to a hospital, and to get him the evaluation and treatment he needed,” Riley said. “Their actions in achieving or attempting to achieve that goal were objectively reasonable, and neither of them are guilty of a single criminal act.”
He cautioned jurors that while an autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide, the opinion of a medical examiner has nothing to do with the legal definition of homicide.
Riley also pointed out that Whitfield III was 400 pounds, had an enlarged heart and had high levels of THC in his system.
The jurors will be presented with evidence and body camera footage they may find disturbing, he added, but they would need to separate their emotions aside and look at all the evidence objectively before reaching a verdict.
Whitfield’s father takes the stand
Herman Whitfield Jr. told the jury he was getting ready for work in the early morning hours of April 25, 2022, when his son walked into the bathroom. One look at his son’s appearance told him something was wrong.
He tried to calm his son down, but he wasn’t making any sense. At one point, when his son tried to hug his mother, the elder Whitfield hit his son in the mouth, hoping that would help him snap out of the state he was in, though he said that did little to quell the erratic behavior.
It wasn’t the first time Whitfield acted strangely, according to the defense.
During cross examination, John Kautzman, an attorney for the defense, asked Whitfield Jr. if he recalled his son’s previous mental health episode that required hospitalization while living in Florida in 2020. Whitfield would move back in with his parents in Indianapolis following that incident.
Kautzman also asked Whitfield Jr. if he recalled accompanying his wife and son on a visit to an Indianapolis mental health clinic in January 2022, three months before his son’s death.
The attorney asked Whitfield Jr. if he recalled the doctor telling him that his son was possibly experiencing psychosis and that further physical or psychological examination was recommended. Whitfield Jr. said he did not recall, as he was not in the room with his son during the appointment.
Knowing all of this, Kautzman asked Whitfield Jr. why he told the prosecution that his son had no history of mental health issues. Whitfield Jr. responded by saying that he wasn’t present during the counseling session in January 2022.
Through his line of questioning, Kautzman appeared to paint a picture of a man whose mental health issues were not properly addressed.
Police testimony and body camera footage
IMPD Sgt. Dominique Clark was one of the first officers to arrive at the Whitfield residence that night.
The footage from Clark’s body camera shows her attempting to calm down Whitfield through conversation.
Jurors watched Clark’s body camera footage, from the moment she arrived at the house to when she hopped in the back of an ambulance.
As the first day of proceedings concluded, jurors also watched body camera footage from Sanchez, the officer who deployed the Taser.
Whitfield’s parents sat in the front row of the gallery, hanging their heads as audio from the deadly encounter blasted through the courtroom.
The couple held each other in silence as the video played.
What’s next?
Witness testimony will continue this week. The trial is expected to end by Dec. 6.
Peter Blanchard covers local government. Reach him at 317-605-4836 or peter.blanchard@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @peterlblanchard.
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