I watched Daniel Prude's horrific assault and relived what the police did to me

On March 30, a 41-year-old Black man named Daniel Prude was killed after Rochester police officers placed a hood over his head and pressed his face into the asphalt, wisps of white snow falling upon the brutal scene. He was reportedly brain-dead when he arrived at the hospital. Seven days later, he was legally declared dead.

The autopsy report from the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s office is a ringing indictment against Prude’s aggressors, stating the cause of death was homicide by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” Excited delirium and acute intoxication by phencyclidine (PCP) are also listed in the report as contributing factors, according to AP News.

At the time of his arrest, Prude was experiencing a mental health emergency. His brother, Joe Prude, said he called the police for help, as his brother was agitated and taken off his clothes.

“I placed a phone call for my brother to get help, not for my brother to get lynched… that was a full fledged ongoing murder,” Prude said in a news conference. “How did you see him and not directly say, ‘The man is defenseless, buck-naked on the ground?’ He’s cuffed up already. Come on.”

My heart shattered when I watched the video: it is distressing to see Prude like that, naked and defenseless, the arresting officers not even bothering to grant him the dignity of covering his body. As I saw them force a hood over his head, I had to look away. The assault on Prude hit too close to home for me, not just as a Black person, but as a Black bipolar person.

One of my most traumatic memories involves being taken away to a state hospital by police officers after a suicide attempt, about six years ago. They handcuffed me and chained me to a police wagon, my arms outstretched in surrender as the van jolted through the streets of DC, my head threatening to smash itself against the steel roof.

Unlike Prude, I came away from that experience with my life, and for that I am grateful. But the experience has haunted me for years and left me with a deeper and more intimate understanding of the horrific intersections of race, mental illness, and police brutality.

In May 2019, a 44 year-old Black woman named Pamela Turner was shot multiple times, at point-blank range, by a Baytown police officer who claimed her mental health crisis made him fear for his life. In the jarring and infuriating video of her execution, it is clear that he is the danger, as Pamela Turner screams and begs for her life.

Turner was diagnosed with schizophrenia years before her death. Her family and friends stressed that she had always been non-violent. And it is true that the vast majority of severely mentally ill people are victims of violence, not perpetrators. But even if she had been violent, she still did not deserve state-sanctioned murder.

In a May 2018 shooting, 24-year-old Black man Marcus-David Peters apparently experienced a psychiatric episode during a shift as a hotel security guard. Peters was also a high school biology teacher. He left the hotel he was working at naked and then veered off the side of a highway in Richmond, VA. A police officer — a Black man named Michael Nyantakyi — used a Taser on Peters. He then shot Peters twice in the stomach, killing him.

Peters’ family were not aware that he was struggling with mental health. “People ask me all the time, ‘What do you think caused him to have a mental break?’ And I say, ‘We’ll never know, because he was killed,’” Peters’ sister, Princess Blanding, told Time magazine. “It was easier to take out the threat, which was his brown skin, than to try to help him.”

In a country with the most liberal definition of “non-compliance” possible — Denver, CO activist Elisabeth Epps was sentenced to 90 days in jail for going limp when an officer attempted to arrest her — Black mentally ill people are especially at risk. This society already sees symptoms of our distress, like rapid speech or hallucinations, as an imminent threat. And to most of society, our skin only compounds that threat.

Black disabled lives are not safe from medical professionals either. As disability journalist Sara Luterman points out on Twitter, mentally ill people are sometimes killed in restraints at state-run psychiatric hospitals — the same carceral institution I was taken to in handcuffs six years ago.

“I watched prone restraint happen when I was in the hospital. An agitated woman on my ward got taken to the ground and her face hit the tile. There was a lot of blood. It’s brutal no matter who does it,” Luterman tweeted.

As the list of names of Black people murdered by police swells and bloats each day, I am exhausted. I am exhausted from seeing people who look like me, who have the same illnesses that I have, being slaughtered by police. Most days, this society seems nearly devoid of mercy or compassion, especially towards Black disabled people. How long will this exhaustion have to last?