DEMOTTE, Ind. — A Northwest Indiana family held a visitation for a beloved father on Tuesday night after they said he died because of an encounter with police during a medical call for help.
Last week, on Sunday, Sept. 8, Emergency Medical Technicians were called to help 26-year-old Rhyker Earl, a beloved father of two who was prone to having seizures.
“He meant the world to all of us, he was loved by all of us,” Rhyker Earl’s aunt Miracle Gawlinski said.
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26-year-old Rhyker Earl, a father of two, who was prone to having seizures died after an encounter with the police during a medical call for help, family members said. -
26-year-old Rhyker Earl, a father of two, who was prone to having seizures died after an encounter with the police during a medical call for help, family members said.
Family members said some of those same EMTs returned later that evening, along with Jasper County police, after Earl suffered a more severe seizure at his home in DeMotte, Indiana, which prompted his grandmother to call 911.
“She’s the one who has reported that he, in trying to put on his shorts to go to the hospital, fell over and bumped into either a police officer or one of the first responders, and that seemed to trigger a change in their behavior to treating him like a criminal at that point instead of a patient,” the family’s attorney Stephen Wagner said.
Family members said officers took Earl to the floor and handcuffed him behind his back with his face in a pillow.
“There was an officer on the upper part of the backside of his body,” Gawlinski said. “I witnessed him begging for his life.”
Gawlinski said she was in the room as his body went limp.
“I was just begging and pleading, ‘He’s blue, he’s blue, like he’s blue, you can tell he’s blue do something, take his pulse,'” Gawlinski said.
According to Gawlinski, when first responders did take his pulse, there wasn’t one.
Earl was then taken to the hospital, but tests confirmed he had no brain activity. He was eventually removed from life support on Sept. 10th.
The sheriff’s office statement from two days later made no mention of the circumstances of Earl’s death. It read that officers responded to a medical 911 call from a residence and on September 10th, the office was informed the patient had passed away.
“The only thing I really have right now is anger,” Gawlinski said.
The family has hired national civil rights attorney Ben Crump and Indiana attorney Stephen Wagner to investigate what happened, and they are zeroing in on the actions of officers and EMTs, which they say put Earl at greater risk.
“The dangers of prone restraint have been known for years to law enforcement. Everybody in the public has known about them since the George Floyd case in May 2020. But it was even worse here because Rhyker was at risk for so many reasons, he had just had a seizure, he was a large man, he was handcuffed behind his back face down, they knew that he had asthma, his face was in a pillow, and on top of all that, they have him three rounds of sedatives,” Wagner said.
The coroner has not yet released Earl’s cause of death, but the attorneys are requesting his medical records and the body camera video of the incident to get answers for his family.
Indiana State Police are now investigating the incident.
The Jasper County Sheriff’s Office told WGN-TV that it had no comment.
WGN has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the body camera video.