The officers have not entered a plea. Lawyers for the officers have cautioned people to wait for more details before judging them. Blake Ballin, who represents Desmond Mills Jr., one of the five officers, said in a statement that the videos have “produced as many questions as they have answers.”
At the scene, the medics at times appeared to defer to the police, standing back at one point as a police officer asked Mr. Nichols what drugs he had taken. Mr. Nichols largely groaned in response, though twice he appears to answer “alcohol.”
For about the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds, no one touches Mr. Nichols as he rolls back and forth on the pavement.
The official cause of Mr. Nichols’s death has not been released by the Shelby County medical examiner’s office. The family said it had commissioned a separate, private autopsy that determined he had suffered from extensive bleeding.
When a young person like Mr. Nichols dies three days after a beating involving blows to the head, Dr. Montgomery said, brain injuries are the most likely cause. He said that, based on video of the beating, Mr. Nichols had likely been at risk for severe traumatic brain injury, rib fractures, collapsed lungs and internal bleeding.
Dr. Montgomery said it was not easy to say whether getting Mr. Nichols into an ambulance or to the hospital more quickly would have made a difference, though some cases, such as a brain injury, would have been helped by early surgery.
“Some brain injuries are too severe for medical care to improve them,” he added. “However, if you manage the other injuries well, the brain will do better. For example, if the patient is not breathing well, the brain will have a much worse outcome.”
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