Ten police officers were involved in the death of Dontae Melton Jr., the Office of the Attorney General announced on Thursday evening. It was the first time Melton’s identity was confirmed by officials, more than two weeks after it was first reported by Baltimore Beat.

“Why such a large response for one 140-150 pound man when they say we don’t have enough police to cover a sector yet they stood around watching my son die?” Eleshiea Goode, Melton’s mother, asks. 

Melton died in the early morning of June 25 after being restrained by police officers during a mental health crisis the night before.

The officers are identified as: 

  • Sergeant Joshua Jackson, 8 years of service
  • Officer Andre Smith, 17 years of service
  • Officer Gerard Pettiford, Jr., 7 years of service
  • Officer Jacob Dahl, 5 years of service
  • Officer Kevin Causion, 5 years of service
  • Officer Ever Cardenas-Huarcaya, 3 years of service
  • Officer Renardo Spencer, 3 years of service
  • Officer Jammal Parker, 2 years of service
  • Officer Darren Hicks, Jr., 2 years of service
  • and Officer Ryan Stetser with 1 year of service. 

“All officers are assigned to the BPD Operations Bureau,” the press release reads. 

The officers listed work in a wide variety of capacities within the agency. 

A short cell-phone video from the night of the incident obtained by the Beat shows roughly that number of officers standing around more than six police cars, consulting with one another, as someone can be heard screaming for help in the background, but cannot be seen because he is blocked from view by a police car. The Beat is not releasing the video because the bystander who filmed it speaks in the video and fears for their safety.

“I don’t know what he did, but they on his ass, baby,” one of the bystanders says on the tape. “Baltimore City Police ain’t playing, baby. Half of the police department out there.” 

The press release says that body-camera footage is usually released within 20 days, noting, however that “there may be situations where more than 20 business days is necessary, including if investigators need more time to complete witness interviews, if there are technical delays caused by the need to shield the identities of civilian witnesses, or to allow family members to view the video before it is released to the public.”

The OAG declined to comment on which of these situations might be causing the delay in this case, but Goode, the mother of the 31-year-old Melton,  says she has not received any additional information. 

First listed among the officers, Joshua Jackson, who brought home $93,121.42 in pay and overtime last year, has often served as a source of good publicity for the department in his guise of “Saint the Rapping Cop,” whose songs and videos about the virtues of policing include lines such as, “Yo, Imma try to help you any way I can. I talk to the citizens like they were my fam. It’s straight from my heart, and I hope they understand.” 

Andre Smith, who was paid $116,322 in 2024, has also been the source of positive PR for the department as the subject of a 2012 Baltimore Sun ride-along story where he is “young, talks fast, cares about the people on his post, and is eager to impress.”

The story goes on to say that he has the “uncanny knack of a good patrol officer: to not only know his area but for his area to know him.” Though the story is unrelentingly positive, it notes that “he’s scuffled with some of these suspects in the past.” 

The same year, Smith was involved in a non-fatal shooting and was later sued for an incident of alleged excessive force in 2016. 

Another of the involved officers, Gerard Pettiford, is the founder of a non-profit called Baltimore Ground Zero, which says it provides field trips for “underprivileged youth.” 

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.

“Neighbors came to my home and told my mom that he was running in alleys, hiding under cars, saying someone was after him,” Goode told the Beat. “I came home from work, his dad, his cousins and the entire neighborhood was looking for him. About two blocks away, he ran into someone’s home and asked them to call the police. 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.”

That is not what happened on the night of June 24. 

The incident that led to Melton’s death began when he approached a police car at the intersection of Franklin Street and Franklintown Road in West Baltimore, asking the officer for help. “I’ve got a gentleman pulling on my doors asking for help,” the officer said on dispatch audio. “But he doesn’t look like he needs help.”

“What training did the first officer have to determine [Melton] didn’t ‘look like’ he needed help?” Goode asks. “How do we go from not looking like he needed help to suddenly needing ten officers to help him for his own good?”

According to the initial report from the IID, “While the officer was speaking to the man, the man walked into the middle of the roadway several times. The officer attempted to restrain the man for the man’s own safety, and when other BPD officers arrived on scene, officers placed the man in handcuffs and leg restraints.”

At the time of his death, Melton was the subject of a warrant for allegedly stealing a car in January and his family wonders if the officers saw him as someone to be apprehended rather than aided.

The report does not say whether the officers used violence to perform this restraint. At one point an officer radioed that “he’s very irate right now. They have leg shackles on him and handcuffs already.”

The death of Melton comes shortly after the release of an audit of the Baltimore Office of the Chief Medical Examiner regarding pro-police and racial bias that lead to deaths that occurred in police restraint as undetermined rather than as homicides. The names of the officers were released on the eve of the 12th anniversary of the death of Tyrone West, whose July 18, 2013 death was initially ruled as “undetermined” and reclassified as a homicide in May. 

In Melton’s case, city officials have sought to blame the lack of medical care on problems with the computer-aided dispatch system which prevented a medic from arriving in a timely fashion. But, in the video, numerous officers stand by as someone screams for help. 

In the case of Bilal Abdullah, who was shot and killed by Baltimore Police a week earlier, Commissioner Richard Worley sought to blame the community, rather than CAD, for the officers’ inability to aid Abdullah. “The crowd actually interfered with our ability to give the victim aid,” Worley said. “Officers from all around the city had to come to kind of quash the disturbance so that we could get the victim to the hospital.”

In that case, as in this, a large number of officers were seen conferring with one another around a single car. The shooting officers in that case were members of a plainclothes squad of “jump-out boys” and at least one of the ten officers named in the case of Melton has worked with the notorious District Action Team (DAT).

In the case of Abdullah, BPD rushed an injured officer to Shock Trauma, while Abdullah bled out on the ground. Only after a long wait, according to dispatch audio, did the officers on the scene with Melton report that they tried to lift him into a car but his body was limp. Like Abdullah’s mother, Goode, Melton’s mother, was left waiting and has been kept in the dark since. “They had him listed as unknown and discarded his clothing and shoes,” she says. “Why did he require such a response? Not one of them had the common sense to take him to the hospital.”