'Someone needs to pay. This is murder': Mother of black man who was tased, beaten and dragged to his death by Louisiana cops slams 'horrific corruption' that covered up his killing
The mother of a Louisiana man who died in police custody two years ago has revealed she watched the police bodycam footage showing his brutal killing last year, and has been 'reliving it every day'.
Mona Hardin, whose son, Ronald Greene, 49, died in May, 2019, said authorities had first told her that he was killed in a car crash after leading Louisiana state troopers on a high-speed chase, in an interview with CNN on Friday.
That narrative would later be contradicted in body camera footage, shown to Hardin last year, in which troopers are seen violently apprehending Greene.
That footage was made public on Wednesday.
'Someone needs to pay. Someone needs to go to jail for this. This is murder what happened to my son Ronny,' she said
Greene died in an ambulance after suffering a cardiac during the arrest.
'We were told he died because of a car crash,' Hardin said. 'The detail that we got afterward was totally everything but.'
Greene's mother, Mona Hardin (left) made claims of a coverup in an interview on Friday, saying that she was initially told her son had died in a car crash. Attorney Lee Merritt (right) is representing the family in a wrongful death lawsuit
The footage shows Greene, a black man, screaming 'I'm your brother, I'm scared!' while being beaten, tasered and dragged by his feet by white troopers.
She says that the, 'coverup started within hours,' after family members received word of her son's death.
She said they were told her Greene's body was being taken out of state to Arkansas for an autopsy.
When Hardin requested Greene be kept in Louisiana, she said a Louisiana coroner told her it was 'out of her hands.'
'This is a case where all of the evidence directly contradicted the narrative provided by law enforcement,' attorney Lee Merritt, who is representing Greene's family in a wrongful death suit, also told CNN.
'I want to be clear that there's nothing standard about how the state troopers in Louisiana handled this arrest or the reporting on it,' he later added.
According to the suit, it would be months before Hardin was given further clarification about her son's death.
Eventually, in 2020 Louisiana authorities gave Greene's family the opportunity to view the body camera footage of his arrest.
'It's horrific hearing my son,' Hardin said of the video. 'It's horrible that everyone has to see this, but at the same moment I'm so glad that it's exposed because of [the] corruption. It's such a horrific level of corruption all the way up to the top, from day one.'
Video taken from Trooper Dakota DeMoss' body camera shows the violent of arrest of Greene. Louisiana State Police initially reported that he had died in a car crash
At one point Trooper Kory York grabbing the leg shackles and dragging Greene on his stomach. York was suspended without pay for 50 days
On Wednesday clips of the footage were released to the public.
They begin with Master Trooper Chris Hollingsworth and Trooper DeKota DeMoss rushing Greene´s SUV, after the barber had led them on a 115-mile-per-hour chase, as he can be seen appearing to raise his hands and repeating, 'OK, OK. I'm sorry.'
Greene is also heard to say: 'I'm your brother! I'm scared! I'm scared!'
Hollingsworth shocks Greene with a stun gun within seconds through the driver's side window as both troopers demand he get out of the vehicle.
Greene exits through the passenger side as Hollingsworth appears to wrestle him to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and punching him in the face while another trooper can be heard calling him a 'stupid mother***r.'
Hollingsworth strikes Greene multiple times and appears to lie on one of his arms before he is finally handcuffed.
The troopers then leave the burly man unattended, facedown and moaning for more than nine minutes, as they use sanitizer wipes to wash blood off their hands and faces.
'I hope this guy ain't got f***ing AIDS,' one of the troopers can be heard saying.
At one point, another trooper, Kory York, yanks Greene´s leg shackles and briefly drags the man, facedown on his stomach.
Moments before, York was seen kicking Greene as he tried to shift from his stomach onto his side in an apparent attempt to breathe more easily.
At least six troopers were on the scene of the arrest but not all had their body cameras on.
Greene's family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the his death. They appear above with attorney Lee Merritt during an Oct. 7 news conference
After a several-minute stretch in which Greene is not seen on camera, he appears again, limp, unresponsive and bleeding from his head and face. He is then loaded onto an ambulance gurney, his arm cuffed to the bedrail.
Troopers initially told Greene's family he died on impact after crashing into a tree during the chase. Later, state police released a one-page statement acknowledging only that Greene struggled with troopers and died on his way to the hospital.
Exactly what caused Greene´s death remains unclear. Union Parish Coroner Renee Smith told the Associated Press last year his death was ruled accidental and attributed to cardiac arrest. A federal and state investigation into his death continues, with a spokesman for Louisiana State Police refusing to comment because of the ongoing probe.
Smith, who was not in office when that determination was made, said her office´s file on Greene attributed his death to the car and made no mention of a struggle with state police.
The AP last year obtained a medical report showing an emergency room doctor noted Greene arrived dead at the hospital, bruised and bloodied with two stun-gun prongs in his back. That led the doctor to question troopers´ initial account that Greene had 'died on impact' after crashing into a tree.
'Does not add up,' the doctor wrote.
'They murdered him. It was set out, it was planned,' Hardin said Wednesday. 'He didn't have a chance. Ronnie didn't have a chance. He wasn't going to live to tell about it.'
Merritt, said the footage 'has some of the same hallmarks of the George Floyd video, the length of it, the sheer brutality of it.'
Greene's mother Mona Hardin (above center). 'They murdered him. It was set out, it was planned,' she said Wednesday
'He apologized in an attempt to surrender,' Merritt said.
Greene´s family has filed a federal wrongful-death lawsuit alleging troopers 'brutalized' Greene, and 'left him beaten, bloodied and in cardiac arrest' before covering up the cause of death. His family has released graphic photographs of Greene´s body on a gurney, showing deep bruises and cuts on his face and head.
'Police departments have got to stop putting roadblocks up to information that is, in the public´s eye, questionable. They have to reveal all that they know, when they know it,' said Andrew Scott, a former Boca Raton, Florida, police chief who testifies as an expert witness in use-of-force cases. 'It suggests that you´re hiding something.'
While noting Greene 'was not without fault' and appeared to resist the troopers´ orders, Scott said the footage of Trooper Kory York dragging the handcuffed man face-down by his ankle shackles was 'malicious, sadistic, completely unnecessary.'
A coroner's report said Greene died of cardiac arrest
'That should never have never happened,' he said. 'You´ve got the guy completely compromised. He´s not hurting anybody.'
Charles Key, another use-of-force expert and former Baltimore police lieutenant, questioned the troopers´ decision to leave Greene unattended, handcuffed and prone for several minutes, calling the practice 'just dead wrong.'
'You don´t leave somebody lying on the ground, particularly after you´ve had this fight,' Key said. 'The training has been for a number of years that, as soon as you get someone under control, you put them on their side to facilitate their breathing ... and particularly this guy, because he was very heavy.'
Hollingsworth, in a separate recording made after the black man's death, could be heard telling a colleague at the office that 'he beat the ever-living f**k out of' Greene.
'Choked him and everything else trying to get him under control,' Hollingsworth is heard saying. 'He was spitting blood everywhere, and all of a sudden he just went limp.'
Hollingsworth later died in a single-vehicle highway crash that happened hours after he learned he would be fired for his role in the Greene case.
York was suspended without pay for 50 hours for the dragging and for improperly deactivating his body camera. York told investigators the device was beeping loudly and his 'mind was on other things.'
DeMoss, meanwhile, was arrested in connection with a separate police pursuit last year in which he and two other troopers allegedly used excessive force while handcuffing a motorist.
In that case, bodycam footage, showed suspect Antonio Harris, 29, immediately surrendered after leaving his vehicle, yet DeMoss hit the suspect with his knee and slapped him in the face before turning off his bodycam, according to the Advocate.
A State Police spokesman declined to comment, citing the federal investigation.
State Police brass initially argued the troopers´ use of force was justified - 'awful but lawful,' as ranking officials described it - and did not open an administrative investigation until 474 days after Greene´s death.
Members of Greene's family at the March on Washington in August. The authorities did not release body camera footage of his arrest until two years later
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