• Christopher Lowe died while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser in
Fort Worth, Texas, on July 26, 2018. When Lowe told officers he was dying and could not breathe, officers told him "Don't pull that shit," berated him, threatened to pepper spray him, and conspired not to tell medical staff about his medical condition, according to disciplinary letters issued against the officers. Five of the officers were fired while two were suspended without pay. Six officers have appealed; one waived his right to appeal and accepted the suspension in lieu of termination. • Derrick Scott died in
Oklahoma City on May 20, 2019 after being restrained by officers for about 13 minutes. Police were responding to a call about someone brandishing a gun. Scott fled when confronted by police and a gun was removed by an officer during the arrest. One officer put her knee between Scott's shoulder blades and a second straddled Scott's back. When Scott told officers multiple times that he couldn't breathe, one officer responded, "I don't care," and another said, "You can breathe just fine." Scott died at the hospital an hour later due to a collapsed lung, according to an autopsy that found physical restraint, recent methamphetamine use, asthma, bullous emphysema and atherosclerotic heart disease contributed to Scott's death. Following an investigation that cleared the officers of wrongdoing,
Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater told the press, "I mean, he's just a perfect candidate to die when you've got meth in your system and those kinds of physical ailments and then you fight with police. [The officers] didn't do anything wrong at all." • Byron Williams died in police custody in
Las Vegas on September 5, 2019, saying, "I can't breathe." Williams had been flagged down by Las Vegas Metro Police officers after they spotted him riding his bike without a safety light just before sunrise at 5:48 a.m. He fled officers and abandoned his bike and then scaled two walls before being arrested 1 minute and 40 seconds after the start of the encounter. According to police, he resisted by refusing to give up on his arms and that he had drugs on him which he tried to conceal. He was arrested and according to the police video, Williams was held down while on his stomach, he said "I can't breathe" at least 17 times before he eventually lost consciousness. At the end of the pursuit, five officers had arrived at the scene to assist in the arrest. Paramedics arrived 14 minutes after Williams lost consciousness and he was later declared dead at the hospital. Las Vegas police released only some of the bodycam video to the public. • John Elliott Neville died in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on December 4, 2019, after being restrained in the
Forsyth County jail. During a medical emergency, he was behaving erratically. He said, "I can't breathe" at least 28 times, as well as "Help me", "Let me go" and "Mama". While he was in bent-leg prone restraint, a technique discouraged in 1995 by the National Law Enforcement Technology Center, jail staff had difficulty removing his handcuffs. Neville had no pulse and
CPR was used, but after being hospitalized he died December 4. Five jailers and a nurse were charged. As of July 24, protests had continued for two weeks. Video of the incident was released after news outlets demanded it. Neville's son Sean Neville filed a
wrongful death suit in
U.S. Federal Court September 29, 2021. The suit named as defendants the five officers,
Wellpath LLC, Kimbrough, and Forsyth County. In court papers filed November 23, 2021, Wellpath denied the nurse violated any policies. In April 2022 a
grand jury indicted the nurse but not the officers. Court documents filed May 25, 2022 show that the Neville family reached a $3 million settlement on April 19 with Kimbrough and the officers, none of whom admit liability. Documents filed July 3, 2023 show that civil claims against Wellpath and the nurse were
dismissed with prejudice. The charge against the nurse was later dropped. • Following the 2021 conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, the DOJ began looking into a 2017 incident discovered by the state prosecution team while doing research for the Chauvin trial. It involved an incident in which Chauvin and another officer were dispatched to a home where a woman claimed she had been attacked by her son and young daughter. Upon arriving, when the boy, fourteen years old at the time, refused to follow the command to lie down on the floor Chauvin hit him with his flashlight so hard that he needed stitches. Then Chauvin allegedly held him down for nearly 17 minutes, ignoring complaints from the boy that he couldn't breathe. According to an account of the incident, after hitting the boy with his flashlight, he grabbed his throat, hit him again, and then "applied a neck restraint, causing the child to lose consciousness and go to the ground." Chauvin and the other officer then placed the boy in a prone position and handcuffed him. According to the account, "the mother pleaded with them not to kill her son." • William Jennette, a truck driver, died in
Marshall County jail in May 2020 after police restrained him. Jennette was prone and handcuffed on the ground, with multiple officers on his back. After Jennette said he could not breathe, an officer told him: "You shouldn't be able to breathe, you stupid bastard", while other officers stayed on his back for some time. A
grand jury did not charge the officers for a crime. His family tried to sue the county, officers, and Lewisburg city for his death in a federal civil rights lawsuit. • Edward Bronstein on 31 March 2020 in custody of
California highway patrol. •
David Dungay Jr., an Australian Aboriginal
Dunghutti man, was killed in
Long Bay Correctional Centre,
Sydney in 2015. Dungay had biscuits and began eating them, and refused or ignored orders to stop. Prison guards entered his cell and compressed his body, while he was on the ground. He repeatedly yelled "I can't breathe!" but this was ignored by prison guards who said "If you can talk, you can breathe." A nurse injected Dungay with
midazolam, a sedative which further depressed his breathing. Dungay died shortly after, still with prison guards on top of him. The incident was caught on camera. No criminal charges were laid, and none of the guards involved faced any disciplinary action. In the aftermath of Floyd's death, Dungay's family members sent their support to Floyd's family and the Black Lives Matter movement, while also observing that Floyd had become better known in Australia than Dungay and that Australians needed to extend their support of black lives to include Indigenous Australians. • In a video released by police, 19-year-old Keith Moses, suspected of first-degree murder, repeatedly used the term during his arrest. • On January 3, 2026, Cuban national
Geraldo Lunas Campos was choked to death by immigration agents at
Camp East Montana in
El Paso, Texas. A witness to his death said that Lunas Campos repeatedly said he couldn't breathe in Spanish. == See also ==