Dontae Melton Jr.’s death in police custody was a homicide, according to Stephanie Moore, spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, who said full details of their report would not be available until the Office of the Attorney General finished its ongoing investigation. A ruling of homicide by the OCME does not always result in homicide charges.
“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has now ruled his death a homicide—confirming what his family knew all along: Dontae’s death was not an accident. It was the direct result of the actions and inactions of those sworn to protect him,” the Greenberg Law Offices, which is representing Melton’s family, wrote in a statement.
The determination was made public a day after six hours of body camera footage from the night of Melton’s death revealed a chaotic scene at the intersection of Franklin Street and Franklintown Road on the night of June 24 full of failures at nearly every level.
From Melton’s initial contact, when he gave his first, middle, and last name and asked for help from a dismissive officer, to a failure of the dispatch system, to a sergeant more concerned with “optics” than aid and reluctant to take responsibility, to a hospital that failed to keep accurate records, the city’s emergency response systems failed the 31-year-old resident suffering a mental health crisis at every step.
From Melton’s initial contact, when he gave his first, middle, and last name and asked for help from a dismissive officer, to a failure of the dispatch system, to a sergeant more concerned with “optics” than aid and reluctant to take responsibility, to a hospital that failed to keep accurate records, the city’s emergency response systems failed the 31-year-old resident suffering a mental health crisis at every step.
Several parts of the audio have been redacted by the Internal Investigations Division of the Office of the Attorney General, which has investigated cases of in-custody death since 2021, so the first publicly available evidence of what happened is not complete. The delay in releasing the footage, which came two months after Melton’s death, is far longer than the 20 business days within which the office generally releases such footage. The six-hour long video includes bodycam footage from 10 previously named officers, although there appear to be other officers who present who have not been named or had their footage released.
According to Lindsey Eldridge, a spokesperson for the Baltimore Police Department, all of the officers but one, who was injured, are currently on active duty. Also according to the department, out of the 10 officers on the scene, only one had received Crisis Intervention Team training, which teaches officers how to respond to mental health and related crises. It is not clear which of the officers that was.
“He doesn’t look like he needs help”
At 9:40 p.m. Melton, who was obviously suffering a mental health crisis, approached the car of Officer Gerard Pettiford Jr. The Axon bodyworn cameras used by the Baltimore Police Department have a brief delay between the start of the video and the audio, so Melton can be seen approaching the window of the car, which is sitting at a red light at the intersection, but there is no audio to capture what he said.
“Get off of my car,” we finally hear Pettiford say, as the audio kicks in. Then he got on the radio. “I got a gentleman pulling on my doors asking for help but he doesn’t look like he needs help,” Pettiford said. In the video, Pettiford seems far more concerned about his car at this point than with Melton’s well-being and later tells his sergeant “at least my doors were locked.”
“Please, bro, please. It’s an emergency,” Melton said. Pettiford got out of the car and approached Melton, who was leaning on the hood.
“What you need, bro?” Pettiford asked.
“I just need help getting to my house,” Melton said.
“That’s not how we do things,” Pettiford said.
“The precinct,” Melton said, after a few unintelligible words.
“For what?” Pettiford asked. Melton’s response is unclear.
Pettiford got on the radio and said he would only need one unit of backup, as Melton slumped on the hood of his car. “He seems like he is having a mental crisis.” Pettiford did not ask for a medic or for crisis intervention-trained officers to be called.
Pettiford got on the radio and said he would only need one unit of backup, as Melton slumped on the hood of his car. “He seems like he is having a mental crisis.” Pettiford did not ask for a medic or for crisis intervention-trained officers to be called.
Melton started to wander off and Pettiford asked “So you don’t need me no more?”
“Yes, I do need you, bro,” Melton said.
Melton’s family believes he may have felt safe approaching a police officer because of an interaction with BPD during his last mental health episode in 2020.
“He ran into someone’s home and asked them to call the police,” Eleshiea Goode told Baltimore Beat in July. “They treated him with kindness as they were an understanding elderly couple. They sat him on their couch and gave him something to drink as he waited for police. The police came, talked to him nicely and explained they were taking him to the hospital. He went with them and was admitted to UMMC [University of Maryland Medical Center]. The police officer called me and told me he was safe. I was relieved because we could not find him for hours and I was worried sick. On that day, those officers ( I was told two responded) understood that he was having a mental health crisis and treated him with respect by getting him to the hospital.”
On the night of June 24, Melton kept coming back toward the police car and wanting to get in it. He told Pettiford that people were chasing him. “He’s behind the truck!” Melton said and ran across traffic, obviously very fearful.
“He just thinks somebody’s chasing him but nobody’s chasing him,” Pettiford said into his radio.
At 9:42 p.m., Pettiford asked “You need an ambulance?” and reiterated that Melton could not get in his car. “I’m not driving you off nowhere.”
Everything that followed could have been avoided if the officer had transported Melton to the hospital, as officers did on the previous occasion.
Pettiford asked Melton if he would go with medics to the hospital. Melton answered with a definitive “Yes.”
“You want to go to the hospital?” Pettiford repeated.
“Yes,” Melton said definitively, and repeated that he wanted to go to the hospital.
Pettiford asked Melton his name and he responded with first, middle, and last name. Pettiford made no note of the name, in part because Melton looked over the police car at the road and said “Oh shit,” and started to run off.
“I can’t even breathe,” Melton said, after running around the car and being asked to sit down by Pettiford, who still did not call for a medic.
A tragic scene unfolded over the next couple minutes, with Melton obviously terrified, thinking he saw the person he believed was after him and begging to get in the police car. “What if something happens to me?”
“Nothing is going to happen to you,” Pettiford said, in what proved to be an obviously false assurance.
From there, everything got worse as more officers arrived and struggled to restrain Melton, whose terror seemed to be amplified by the chaos of the situation. At 9:45, someone on the radio asked Pettiford where he was. “Frank and Frank, I already said it,” he snapped. According to other officers later in the video, Pettiford’s call was interrupted by a city-wide broadcast urging police to stay hydrated in the heat, a foreshadowing of the catastrophic failure of the computer-aided dispatch system that the city attributes to the high temperatures. But still, there was no call for a medic. At 9:46 p.m., in a jumbled conversation as he struggled with Melton, Pettiford said “It’s an EP,” which is short for “emergency petition,” meaning that he was taking Melton into custody for a psychiatric evaluation.
The protocols dictating the treatment of individuals identified as emergency petitions by the Baltimore Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Services are explicit: patients should not be restrained in the prone position, and handcuffed patients are to be secured in a “face-up” position with their hands in front of their body. These procedures are designed to prioritize the safety and medical needs of individuals experiencing a behavioral health crisis, reflecting both best practices in emergency medicine and human rights standards. The guidance explicitly references the role of police, signaling a coordinated approach intended to prevent harm during behavioral health interventions.
In the case of Melton, officers verbally acknowledged him as an emergency petition, yet officers repeatedly allowed Melton to be placed face down or on his side. They also handcuffed him behind his back while he lay prone to the ground — an action plainly prohibited in the EMS manual.
In a horrible irony, Melton’s mother filed an emergency petition for her son on June 23, one day before Pettiford frantically called for the same thing. Her petition was denied.
By the time Pettiford made that call on the radio several more officers are swarming around him, certainly making the situation more frightening as they struggled to restrain Melton with handcuffs and shackles, which they eventually succeeded in doing as he wailed and screamed in anguish, saying three times that he couldn’t breathe as tried to turn him on his stomach. At 9:48 p.m., amidst the chaos, someone said “I need a medic” for the first time, a very long eight minutes after Melton first sought aid.
Once Melton was restrained, Sergeant Joshua Jackson had arrived on the scene and reported on the radio that Melton was “very irate right now,” although it is clear in the video that Melton was not irate at all — he was terrified. To cast his terror — which was not directed toward the police, who he still begged for help — as anger could have had some impact on the treatment of Melton. According to departmental policy about responding to a call where someone is experiencing a crisis, an officer with CIT training should be called and take charge of the scene and officers should gather the name of the individual while de-escalating the situation.
Once Melton was restrained, Sergeant Joshua Jackson had arrived on the scene and reported on the radio that Melton was “very irate right now,” although it is clear in the video that Melton was not irate at all — he was terrified. To cast his terror — which was not directed toward the police, who he still begged for help — as anger could have had some impact on the treatment of Melton.
Twice, when asked if anyone knew his name, Pettiford said that Melton told him, but no one followed up trying to find out. This would have tragic repercussions later.
At 9:54 p.m. someone asks if a medic has been called. “Yes,” is the reply. But then someone — it seems to be Pettiford — gets on the radio to “make sure a medic is en route.” There was no audible response. A minute later, Jackson called again for a medic and was told there was no ETA.
“The dispatcher we got going on right now, I don’t know what planet he’s on but he’s not on earth,” Jackson said.
Mayor Brandon Scott has said that the failure of the computer-aided dispatch system on the night Melton died, which has been attributed to the extreme heat, is being investigated.
“There are backup procedures and things that are in place, and a part of the investigation is to go back and look and see how those were used in this situation as well,” Scott said.
“I could have made a smoke signal by now that would have gotten the fire department here. I could have probably jogged to the fire department,” one of the officers said.
“He’s unconscious now”
During the long wait for a medic that never came, with 10 officers milling about, a padded, protective helmet called a “red man helmet” was placed on Melton’s head. Two officers went to get cold water to pour on Melton because he was so hot. As officers stood around talking and laughing, Jackson redirected them. “All right, let’s focus on him, please… we got a dude with a helmet laying on the ground.”
“His pulse is crazy high. I can feel it in his elbow,” another officer said. They decided to put Melton in the back of a police car to transport him, but when he was “completely dead weight” they decided to put him back down,
At one point, Pettiford, who fell on his hand and hurt it, suggests they call a medic for him, too, so it might come faster. But many of the officers, who stood around making jokes, seemed more concerned with Pettiford’s hand than Melton’s condition. Eventually, another officer drove Pettiford to Mercy Hospital.
At 10:12 p.m., 30 minutes after their initial encounter, Pettiford called for a medic again, saying that Melton was unconscious. “When you say unconscious, that means somebody got knocked out man,” said Jackson, correcting his subordinate’s language. Melton, officers said, was not unconscious, he was unresponsive.
But, a few minutes later, another group of officers tried to move Melton into the car again. He slid out of the car, seeming to hit his head on the ground. “Oh shit,” said Pettiford, who was not among those moving him. “He’s unconscious now.”
“It’s all about the optics, baby”
The treatment of Melton’s crisis was hampered by initial indifference to his suffering, a defective call system, and by an overriding concern about “optics” on the part of Jackson, the ranking officer at the scene, who is known as “Saint the Rapping Cop” and has been the subject of departmental PR pushes.
Around 10:18 p.m., when officers were trying to put Melton in a car, Jackson was concerned not about its effectiveness but about how it would look. “I think we should just wait on the medic guys. Let’s just wait. That does not look good. Looks like you guys, like a person is dead in the car, man.”
He brought home the point: “This don’t look good. It’s all about optics, baby.”
He later went on to state more humane reasons for not moving Melton. “The reason why I don’t believe it’s safe to put him in a car because hypothetically, we hit a turn or something, he’s limp… the man’s going to be flying around the car,” he said. But appearances were a primary concern.
But again, when an officer suggested that he could go to one of the three fire stations within two miles to bring someone back, Jackson, while Melton was still unresponsive, balked because of agency politics.
“Yeah but I mean, would y’all feel a certain way if a fireman came down to the police station and said ‘where y’all at?’” he said.
“They do it all the time,” someone said.
“We can’t do that,” Jackson said, dismissively, although the action could have potentially saved Melton’s life. A few minutes later, on the phone with a lieutenant, he reiterated his safety concerns about transporting Melton, but also noted that “he took some K2. When I got here he was going completely nuts. I think he’s coming down now and is completely out of it.” Though Melton struggled from addiction in his life, there was no evidence Melton used the synthetic drug K2 or any drugs that night, and this false belief that Melton was “coming down” may also have influenced the treatment he received.
When an officer noted that “his breathing is getting shallower and shallower,” and said they could no longer wait on a medic, Jackson reluctantly agreed.
“Let’s get him in the car,” he said. “It’s crazy because this puts the onus on us now. Let’s put him in the car and get him there by any means and then we’ll figure it out.”
As officers struggled to put him in the car, Jackson again stressed his concern for the optics of the situation. “This optically looks bad putting an unconscious person in the car.”
“It’s crazy because this puts the onus on us now. Let’s put him in the car and get him there by any means and then we’ll figure it out…This optically looks bad putting an unconscious person in the car.”
Sergeant Joshua Jackson
“It’s just too long, too long. We have a duty to do our best,” the other officer said.
“John Doe”
Finally, at 10:27 p.m., three officers drove Melton toward Grace Medical Center, with Officer Ever Cardenas-Huarcaya sitting in the back seat with Melton to support him and make sure he was not further injured in the police car.
A woman at the hospital asked the officers to “get the handcuffs off, please,” as they tried to remove him from the car. This may have accounted for the erroneous hospital record saying that Melton was under arrest when he arrived at the hospital. One of the officers remarked on the “red man helmet” saying that Melton “was hitting his head because he took something,” which may have accounted for another erroneous hospital record, claiming he was hitting his head on the floor of the police cruiser. The records, obtained by the Beat, also erroneously claimed that he did not arrive at the hospital until 11:00 p.m. and that the police car stopped first at a fire station, which they did not.
According to medical records and the IID, Melton did not die until sometime 3:00 a.m. on June 25. He was considered a John Doe at the hospital — and was still characterized as such for roughly six weeks following his death.
If Pettiford had made note of Melton’s name, or if someone had asked him for it again before he lost consciousness, the hospital would have had access to his medical records and his family, at the very least, could have been with him as he died. And yet, the inability to make that simple note early in the process meant that Melton died alone and unknown. He was the father of a 13-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter and remained active in their lives despite his struggles.
If Pettiford had made note of Melton’s name, or if someone had asked him for it again before he lost consciousness, the hospital would have had access to his medical records and his family, at the very least, could have been with him as he died. And yet, the inability to make that simple note early in the process meant that Melton died alone and unknown.
“Dontae loved his kids and they loved him,” Goode, his mother, told the Beat in June.
“Dontae did the best he could to show up for those he loved. He has a special relationship with my mom, and he helped to care for her when she was ill. ”
Goode, a retired school counselor in Baltimore City Public Schools, said then that the system failed her son and was “not set up for people like my son to succeed.”
The IID knew Melton’s identity the next day, because they came to Goode’s home to inform the family of his death, but the hospital was not informed and his family was unable to get access to the medical records, however faulty, until this month.
The determination of the case as a homicide by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner comes on the heels of a massive audit released in May that found that three dozen in-custody deaths should have been ruled homicides during the nearly 20-year tenure of OCME’s previous chief Dr. David Fowler, who instead ruled them as “undetermined.” All of these cases were “restraint related” such as the case of Tyrone West, which bore many initial similarities to Melton’s case. The number of deaths due to positional asphyxiation in the audit demonstrates that the kind of behavior seen on the Melton video — in which restraining someone is of greater priority than caring for them — is a long-standing problem for the Baltimore Police Department.
The audit found that deaths involving Black people and those involving law enforcement restraint were less likely to be ruled homicides compared to other cases, and recommended that law enforcement require the use of body cameras in all restraint situations, provide better training on the dangers of improper restraint techniques, and include mental health professionals in crisis responses.
“This was a preventable tragedy,” the statement from the family’s lawyers reads. “His family is demanding answers, transparency, and accountability. They are also calling for systemic reform so that no other family endures the needless loss of a loved one in a moment when help — not harm — was needed most. The system must be fixed.”
Kori Skillman and Madeleine O’Neill contributed reporting.