On Friday, authorities in Sedgwick County, Kansas released video footage from the Juvenile Intake Assessment Center where 17-year-old Cedric Lofton died after guards held him down for more than a half hour.
Lofton was taken to the detention center on Sept. 24 after his foster father called 911 saying the teen was having a mental breakdown and thought people were trying to kill him.
At around 1 a.m. police responded to the call and arrived at Lofton’s foster parents house. After over an hour of trying to talk the teen into going with them willingly, officers bound Lofton’s legs with a WRAP restraint, put him in handcuffs and took him to the detention center. According to the sheriff’s office, Lofton was restrained and taken to the detention center because he refused voluntary treatment and resisted arrest.
Once at the detention center, Lofton got into an altercation with guards and was restrained. According to the autopsy report, the teen was restrained and held in a “face-down position impeded his breathing, which caused the supply of oxygen to his heart to be compromised until the point that his heart stopped.”
The autopsy report ruled Lofton’s death a homicide, however, Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett declined to press charges against the juvenile center employees, saying they were acting in self-defense and therefore immune from prosecution.
“Is it reckless in a general sense?” Bennett said of the employees’ behavior. “Perhaps. But is it reckless under Kansas law? It is not.”
The NAACP called on the county to file charges, saying that Lofton’s death, ‘“whether negligent or intentional,” was “unconscionable and inhumane.”
In a statement through their attorneys, Lofton’s family called the decision “yet another instance of an unarmed Black teenager killed by law enforcement with impunity.”
The recently released video captured by cameras mounted inside the juvenile facility’s lobby area, reveals some of what happened before Lofton’s death.
The teen can be seen in the video walking around the lobby and talking to two employees. Due to the lack of sound in the video, it is unclear what Lofton or the staff members are saying. At one point Lofton appears to try to walk out of the lobby but he is stopped by one of the employees. After a few minutes of talking the two men grab Lofton and try to restrain him. They force him into a nearby cell, where they are joined by two more employees. The four hold the teen on the floor, attempting to restrain him, for more than 30 minutes until they realize Lofton is unresponsive and doesn’t have a heartbeat.
EMS workers administer CPR and are able to briefly restarted Lofton’s pulse before rushing him to the hospital where he would die, two days later, of cardiopulmonary arrest.
Read more