Kerwin Harris died after a St. Louis cop held him in a chokehold. It was ruled an accident

17 December 2024

Kerwin Harris’ son, Kerwin Harris Jr., in St. Louis in September 2024 (Clara Bates/Missouri Independent).

Kerwin Harris’ heart beat for the last time as he lay on the ground of a residential St. Louis street.

Harris was chased, pinned face-down and held in a carotid-artery chokehold by then-St. Louis police officer Steven Pinkerton, who thought he matched the description of a robber-at-large.

Another officer used a Taser to shock him six times.

When officers finally handcuffed him and rolled him to his back, Harris’ body was limp. Police couldn’t find a pulse. Soon after midnight on Dec. 23, 2012, Harris — a Black 39-year-old father of two — was declared dead.

The police later concluded he wasn’t involved in the robbery.

The St. Louis medical examiner’s office eventually ruled Harris’s death was an accident caused primarily by heart disease.

The death didn’t spur protests, lawsuits or media scrutiny.

A St. Louis cop sent a Black man to prison, but the jury never heard about the officer’s past

The Independent began looking into the 2012 death as part of a months-long investigation into the case of another Black man from St. Louis, Kurtis Watkins, who was convicted of charges related to a shooting based on the testimony of a single eyewitness: Officer Steven Pinkerton.

Watkins and his lawyers never learned about Pinkerton’s involvement in Harris’ arrest and death, which legal experts agree could have been used to challenge his credibility at trial.

Harris’ family, too, was largely kept in the dark about the circumstances of his death. They were suspicious of the police account but had no evidence to the contrary. They were never given the medical examiner’s report or the police report.

Three longtime forensic pathologists who agreed to review the records for The Independent said Harris’ death should have been ruled a homicide, not an accident.

Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner who estimates he’s conducted more than 20,000 autopsies in his career, said Harris died because the officer’s pressure on his neck and back, as he lay on his stomach, left him unable to breathe.

It’s true Harris’ autopsy showed high blood pressure, a marker of heart disease, “but hypertensive heart disease had nothing to do with his cause of death,” Baden said. “His cause of death was the way he was restrained, so that’s asphyxia — and that’s not an accident, that’s a homicide.”

“Homicide,” in the medical examiners’ context, refers to how a death came about, not whether a crime occurred.

Baden said Harris’ death resulted from “a textbook case of neck and back restraint.” In that regard, he said, “it’s really very much like the George Floyd case, and also the Eric Garner case,” referring to two high-profile deaths in police chokeholds and prone-position restraints that spurred protests, the former in Minneapolis in 2020 and the latter in New York City in 2014.

Dr. Joye Carter, a former Washington, D.C., chief medical examiner, said the injuries in the autopsy report are “consistent with use of force and pressure to the neck,” particularly on the larynx and internal neck structure.

“I am kind of surprised, in a way, that they would just jump over to ‘this is an accident,’” Carter said, “because anyone can say they didn’t mean to kill somebody. That doesn’t make it an accident.”

Tara Rick, the executive director of operations for the St. Louis Medical Examiner’s Office, said all staff involved in Harris’ case have either left the agency or retired, so “I can’t answer any questions about what they wrote or what they were thinking or where they got the information, those types of things, other than what is stated in the report.”

Pinkerton did not respond to multiple requests for comment and appeared to block an Independent reporter on Facebook after several messages went unanswered.

Seeing the paperwork about how his father died for the first time in April, Harris’ son, Kerwin Jr., now 34, said the unanswered questions surrounding the death had been consuming him for years.

“They took everything from me,” he said. “My dad was my world.”

Nicole Phillips, a sister of Kerwin Sr., described him as the “nucleus of our family” — generous, quick to laugh, the family member everyone sought out for advice.

Though she wasn’t surprised to read what happened the night of his death — she hadn’t trusted the police narrative — she said it still felt wrong to be learning about it from a reporter 12 years after the fact.

“That’s the injustice of all of it,” Phillips said.

December 22-23, 2012

The morning of Dec. 22, 2012, a Denny’s restaurant in St. Louis was robbed of $109. The robber told witnesses he had explosives, according to the police report.

That night, Pinkerton was starting an overnight shift, he later wrote in a police report. He had stopped at a QuikTrip gas station to buy a drink and go to the restroom when he saw a gold Buick Century in the parking lot.

It was the same model of car that the Denny’s robber had escaped in.

In the car was Harris, who was, like the robber, Black and wearing a dark knit hat and glasses.

Pinkerton ran Harris’ license plate which “revealed no theft on the primary screen,” according to the police report. As he was waiting for more information and preparing to notify the dispatcher of a possible robbery suspect, Harris started his car engine.

Pinkerton put on his emergency lights and blocked Harris from backing up. Harris got out and began to run away, according to Pinkerton’s arrest report.

“I believed I was pursuing a robbery suspect,” Pinkerton later wrote.

In several respects, Harris didn’t match witnesses’ description of the Denny’s robber. Harris was at least 80 pounds heavier, according to his autopsy alongside witness descriptions. He was also at least two inches taller. The robber wore a green cap, but Harris wore a black one.

In the course of running, Harris’ pants slipped down so Pinkerton could see that he didn’t have a gun in the back of his waistband, he later wrote. Pinkerton tackled him.

Once tackled and on the ground, Harris wouldn’t release his arms from under him despite Pinkerton’s commands, according to the police report. He said Harris displayed “unusual force” and tried at first to stand up, despite Pinkerton’s 230-pound weight on his back, he wrote.

Harris “continued struggling to get back up to his feet,” Pinkerton wrote, as he applied pressure to his back, pinning him down.

Pinkerton noted that Harris held in his fist a bag of off-white chunks that appeared to be cocaine. The department later confirmed the substance to be 3.6 grams of cocaine, according to the lab test.

Pinkerton became worried that Harris was trying to retrieve a weapon from his torso or the front of his waistband.

That belief was “due to the presence of what I believed was a large amount of ‘crack cocaine,’ combined with him matching the description of a robbery suspect who was alleged to have been armed with explosives,” Pinkerton wrote.

Other officers soon responded to Pinkerton’s call for aid. A witness said she overheard Pinkerton tell the other officers that Harris’ car was “at the QuikTrip with a bomb in it,” according to an interview included in the police report.

Pinkerton, according to the later police report, began hitting the side of Harris’ face with an open fist to try to render him temporarily unconscious.

“Kerwin H. continued his strenuous resistance and appeared to gain strength with each successive cycle of strikes and commands,” Pinkerton wrote.

However, several witnesses who lived at a nearby apartment building told detectives they didn’t see Harris resisting. One witness told a detective she heard Pinkerton cursing at Harris and calling him the N-word.

The department didn’t begin using body cameras until 2020, and there is no dashboard-camera footage from the arrest.

Pinkerton wrote that he decided to apply a chokehold to Harris because of his continued resistance.

Five years earlier, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department had banned the neck restraint called a carotid chokehold, which reduces blood to the brain and is designed to render someone temporarily unconscious. It is considered deadly force, which must be justified by an officer’s reasonable fear of serious physical injury or death.

Pinkerton reported that he feared for his life in case Harris was “able to retrieve a weapon,” so he applied the chokehold for around 15 to 20 seconds.

Another officer, Timothy McNamara, shocked Harris six times with a Taser directly against his skin. Protocol according to agency guidelines at the time was to use a Taser a maximum of three times, barring an unusual circumstance, and McNamara said in the report he thought he’d only done it three times.

McNamara, through the department’s media spokesperson, declined to comment. He is still working at the St. Louis Metro Police, the spokesperson confirmed.

When Harris was finally handcuffed, the officers rolled him over and he “became limp,” Pinkerton wrote. He was bleeding from his mouth, Pinkerton wrote, “which I found to be unusual.”

The officers checked for a heartbeat and found none. They administered CPR.

Harris was taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital and pronounced dead after midnight on Dec. 23.

Pinkerton said he applied the chokehold because he believed that Harris had robbed Denny’s and that he was armed. Both beliefs turned out to be incorrect. Harris was not the robber — that case remains open — and he had no weapon.

Left in the dark

Later that morning, the day before Christmas Eve, Harris’ sister Nicole received a call: A homicide detective had called her mother, her niece relayed, and the family needed to go identify Kerwin.

Nicole didn’t understand why the police would need them to identify her brother. She assumed he was arrested.

Harris had a criminal record — several drug charges and one misdemeanor third-degree assault charge — and had been sentenced to supervised probation, according to Missouri court records.

When Nicole relayed the call to her supervisor and said the words homicide detective, “his face dropped.”

Harris’ brother, Frank, got a call from his younger brother, saying Kerwin had passed away. He started calling all the hospitals in town, asking if Harris was a patient there. He couldn’t grasp that his brother was already gone.

At around 11 that morning, the family members gathered at the medical examiner’s office. A detective escorted them to the conference room.

According to the family members and the medical examiner’s full case file obtained by The Independent, a detective and staff member from the medical examiner’s office stood at the front of the room. They displayed a photo of Harris’ body on the screen that a detective had taken at the hospital earlier that morning.

“Is this Mr. Harris right here?” Nicole remembers someone asking.

It was.

The family wasn’t allowed to view his body because it was being examined by the pathologist, the medical examiner’s office investigator wrote in the report.

Nothing was said about Harris being tackled, held in a chokehold, or shocked with a Taser, in their recollection.

The family remember being told that Harris fit the description of a robber, that he’d run and then collapsed. “When the officer got to him, he was nonresponsive,” Nicole remembers being told.

The case file says simply: “The family was informed of the circumstances.”

The family was asked a series of questions about Harris’ health conditions, according to both the records and family memories. According to the medical examiner’s report, one of the questions was whether he had sickle cell trait, which a New York Times investigation found has been frequently cited to rule in-custody deaths of Black people the result of accidents or natural causes.

Rick, the St. Louis Medical Examiner’s Office’s executive director of operations, told The Independent that these are “routine questions” designed to gather relevant information for determining the cause and manner of death, including prior medical and social history.

Hearing additional details from the records from a reporter for the first time earlier this year — the face-down tackling, carotid chokehold, strikes to the face and being shocked by a Taser six times — his family members were taken aback.

“That was excessive force,” Nicole said.

They also said Pinkerton’s suspicion that Harris was the Denny’s robber seemed a stretch. The car model he drove was a common “grandpa kind of car,” his niece, Kierra Harris said, and the description of a Black man with glasses and a winter hat was vague. At a St. Louis pizza restaurant earlier this year, Nicole, hearing the description Pinkerton gave, looked around and counted three Black men with glasses.

The siblings said they were never given any paperwork and didn’t hear from the medical examiner’s office again.

Lauren Bonds, executive director of the nonprofit National Police Accountability Project, said she isn’t surprised to hear that the family wasn’t told the details of what happened.

“What’s told to the family and what’s told to the public rarely is the full story, and sometimes can be a mismatch of what happened and will almost always downplay officer involvement,” said Bonds, whose organization works to end what it considers law enforcement abuse of authority, through legal campaigns and education.

Daniel Harawa, a New York University law professor who previously worked at Washington University in St. Louis and argued on behalf of the circuit attorney’s office to overturn the high-profile wrongful conviction case of Lamar Johnson, said a lack of police transparency poses a “real barrier to families trying to get justice for loved ones that may have been harmed during police contact.”

“There are all of these mechanisms in place to shield officers from accountability,” he said.

Death in a face-down restraint

Medical examiners are responsible for issuing a death certificate for anyone who dies during a police encounter, listing a manner — homicide, suicide, accidental, natural or undetermined — as well as a cause of death.

Harris didn’t have any drugs in his system, the report notes. The St. Louis medical examiner’s office ruled Harris’ death an accident caused by hypertensive heart disease and “exacerbated by police chase and restraint.”

Longtime pathologists who reviewed the records for The Independent disagreed with those findings.

Dr. Victor Weedn, former chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland, who has researched the danger of restraining someone face-down, in what’s called prone position, said Harris’ case has the characteristics of many deaths by restraint he’s studied.

“All these cases should be called homicide. I feel that very strongly,” Weedn said. “And that’s not trying to say the police are bad people. I don’t think they intend to do this. I think the vast majority of times they are surprised.”

Extensive research shows the danger of pinning someone face-down for extended periods of time, which compresses the chest and can make it hard to breathe. That risk can be exacerbated when extra pressure is added to compress the neck or back. The exact mechanism has been debated — whether it’s a lack of oxygen or excess carbon dioxide that can cause death in these situations. More recent research, including Weedn’s, suggests that the position makes it hard for the person to blow off excess carbon dioxide, causing cardiac arrest.

Weedn also reviewed relevant sections of Harris’ emergency medical records from that night obtained by The Independent, which he said support that the mechanism of death was prone restraint cardiac arrest, based in part on the electrical activity of his heart.

The risks of holding people in prone positions have long been known — the federal government began warning in the 1990s that extended prone positions in arrests can be fatal.

And being placed in a prone position can produce the appearance of resistance when the person is really just struggling for oxygen — a “vicious cycle,” as the U.S. Department of Justice called it in 1995.

Carter, the former Washington, D.C., medical examiner, said what jumped out to her while reading the autopsy report were the injuries, especially the petechiae — small spots caused by bleeding under the skin — on Harris’ larynx and the internal surface of his neck.

She emphasized that medical examiners are “not supposed to justify” police actions, just find what caused the person’s death.

An accident is something unavoidable, Carter said, like falling onto the third rail drunk and getting electrocuted or a child running out into the street and being hit by a car. The National Association of Medical Examiners defines homicide as occurring “when death results from a volitional act committed by another person to cause fear, harm or death.”

There doesn’t have to be criminal intent.

“This (was) not an accident,” Carter said. “In my opinion, this would be a homicide and then let you decide in court, with a grand jury, whether it’s justifiable or not.”

‘Forced out’ of the department

Deaths in custody generally lead to police internal investigations. The St. Louis police declined to comment on the outcome of any investigation into Harris’ death.

There is no record that the circuit attorney’s office ever considered bringing criminal charges against the officers in Harris’ case.

“Labeling it an accident — at that point it’s hard for the prosecutor’s office to charge anybody with a homicide offense,” said Harawa, the law professor. “If the cause of death is deemed to be an accident, that is already a heavy, heavy hand on the scale of not pursuing any kind of homicide charges.”

Pinkerton remained with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police until 2021. His Facebook account offers a possible explanation for his departure from the department, in the form of at least five posts referring to having been “forced out.”

“For all you mother f—— at the St. Louis Police Department,” one post began last November, “especially the Internal Affairs Division, you can all kiss my a— for condemning me and pushing me out of my decorated career and losing my ability to retire with the benefits I wanted, all because I exposed the corruption behind the prosecution of Derek Chauvin.”

Derek Chauvin was the Minneapolis police officer found guilty in 2021 for killing George Floyd by holding him face-down as he knelt on his neck while Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.

Pinkerton has worked at the police department in Moscow Mills, a community of 3,300 about 50 miles northwest of St. Louis, since August 2022.

The chief of police in Moscow Mills, Terry Foster, declined to answer a list of questions but confirmed Pinkerton is an active employee.

A national pattern

The Associated Press found that between 2012 and 2021, roughly 1,000 people died across the country after police subdued them using means not intended to be lethal.

Most of those deaths — 740 — involved officers restraining someone face-down.

That investigation found 21 cases in Missouri over that period, just three of which were declared homicides. The most common determination was “accident.”

There have been at least four deaths in police custody in Missouri since 2021 from force not intended to be lethal, according to Mapping Police Violence, which tracks news articles about deaths in police custody. Tasers were used in three of those, and a restraint in at least one.

Some states have adopted restrictions on the use of prone restraints, but not Missouri.

A spokesperson for the St. Louis Metro Police said the department doesn’t have any formal policy about prone restraint, and a Sunshine request for related training materials also produced nothing.

As part of a 2018 deposition in a lawsuit stemming from a death in custody, the St. Louis metro police’s training expert told lawyers that training has long included the danger of prone restraint — “it’s just been there forever” — but that it’s not formal.

Seth Stoughton, a national policing expert and law professor at the University of South Carolina, said agencies are increasingly moving to put that guidance into formal policy to help communicate its importance to officers.

“The trend right now is for agencies to make it more of a policy issue than just a training issue,” Stoughton said, “because it is really important, and putting it in policy helps the agency communicate to officers not only is this important, but it’s something that we actually care about and measure and will if you fail to do it, potentially hold you accountable.”

Harris’ family members get a somber feeling as the winter holidays, and the anniversary of his Dec. 23 death, approach.

They remember him as someone you could go to with any problem, without judgment, and he’d help you find the solution.

He loved dogs, playing air-hockey with his son, and beginning the day with a chocolate donut and the newspaper — usually the Post-Dispatch or St. Louis American. He started shopping for Christmas gifts for his family months in advance.

“It was a blessing that this family would get to have somebody like that,” his niece, Kierra said. “And it hurts when somebody takes it away from you.”

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

SUPPORT

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

From Your Site Articles