A prosecutor in Virginia has dropped the charges against five law enforcement officers who had been charged with murder in the death of a 28-year-old Black man, Irvo Otieno, who died of asphyxia at Central State Hospital after sheriff’s deputies and hospital workers restrained him for 11 minutes, according to surveillance video and the medical examiner, the Washington Post Reports. The decision curtails the scope of what was once a sprawling case to just three defendants. Authorities in Dinwiddie County initially charged 10 people in Otieno’s death. Seven were sheriff’s deputies and three were hospital workers inside the admissions room where Otieno died March 6, 2023, sparking international headlines and becoming a rallying cry against police use of force targeting unarmed Black men. Otieno’s mother, Caroline Ouko, criticized the decision by Dinwiddie Commonwealth’s Attorney Amanda Mann to drop five of the cases. At a news conference Monday in Richmond, Ouko said she had met with Mann to protest her “radical, reckless decision.” Defense attorneys argued for months in private talks with Mann’s office that not all the deputies and hospital workers were piling on him or exerting the same level of force.
Police initially encountered Otieno while responding to a report of a burglary on March 3, 2023, and he was put on an emergency mental health hold and sent to Parham Doctors’ Hospital for an evaluation and help, authorities have said. He was accused of assault at that facility and taken to the Henrico County jail. Jail surveillance video shows Sanders, one of the sheriff’s deputies still under indictment, punching at Otieno before he was removed from his cell and taken to Central State Hospital on March 6, 2023, for mental health treatment, officials have said. In a court filing last year, Baskervill had argued that all 10 original defendants should face trial at the same time because each participated in restraining Otieno, although she added that “the most culpable persons as first-degree principals would be those on his torso.” “It is not irrelevant that if one person here had acted differently, then Otieno may very well have been able to survive,” Baskervill wrote at the time.