Photo courtesy of The Grio
The mother of a man left paralyzed and died from a violent encounter with a Prince George’s County police officer has filed a civil lawsuit against the county after alleging that they failed to protect the public from an officer known to use “unlawful force.”
On Monday, Rena Ward filed the $75 million-dollar lawsuit at the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland. Ward’s son, 24-year-old Demonte Ward-Blake, died in August after being paralyzed from the chest down due to a traffic stop in August 2019, The Daily Record reported.
Ward has retained the law firm Murphy, Falcon & Murphy, known for handling high-profile civil rights cases, to represent her in Ward-Blake’s death.
“On Oct. 17, 2019, Demonte took his last steps and experienced his last moment of life that was not saturated with intense and immeasurable pain. For the next six hundred and fifty-three days, Demonte’s life was a living hell. Then, because he was so injured, he ultimately died,” Ward’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.
The lawsuit named Prince George’s County police Cpl. Bryant Strong, the defendant who faces multiple charges, including assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office from Ward-Blake’s arrest.
Strong “intentionally and viciously slammed Demonate on his face after he was already handcuffed behind his back,” the lawsuit wrote.
The police officer said he pulled over Ward-Blake on Oct. 17, 2019, because of an expired tag. However, the Washington Post reported that Ward-Blake allegedly tried to flee from the scene.
In the lawsuit, there are claims that Strong allegedly attacked Ward-Blake as part of a pattern of illegal use of force that Prince George’s County police officers are likely to use. Additionally, the police department seemingly ignored the signals that Strong was a potential threat to the public, the complaint said.
“As a direct and proximate result of PGPD’s tolerance, encouragement, and condonation of using excessive force, upon information and belief, Defendant Strong was never properly flagged pursuant to the Early Identification System despite having used force against County citizens nearly 30 times from 2016 to 2019,” the lawsuit claims.
“Instead, he was permitted by his ranking officers to brutalize other citizens, just as he ultimately did to Demonte Ward-Blake.”
The complaint provided a list of examples where Prince George’s County police officers have used excessive force on public citizens for years. It also targeted the department for failing to utilize the Early Identification System policy to identify police officers using improper force, per The Daily Record.
During his arrest, Ward-Blake suffered a severe injury to his spinal cord. According to the complaint, he was transported to a nearby hospital and needed surgery to remove “vertebral discs in order to decompress his spinal cord.”
Though surgeons inserted plates, rods, and screws in his spine to support the vertebra, the procedure did not repair Ward-Blake’s quadriplegia, which completely paralyzed him. He died on Aug. 1, 2021, and the medical examiner said a flattened spine contributed to his death.
According to state records, the case is still pending review.