Watching your husband die at the hands of police (Warning: graphic video)

[struggle4progress]

95. I don't know exactly what happened. According to accounts, police used pepper-spray; but the video

doesn't show that; and it might matter a great deal whether it was a quick dose to face or whether he inhaled most of a container of it. The wife claims police beat him, but the video doesn't show that either; it may have happened, or it may not have happened. The cellphone video isn't taken from a convenient angle: it might show one officer kneeling on the man's back; so far as I can tell, it doesn't show more than one officer on his back. I expect a heavy person kneeling on another person's back might indeed cause suffocation, but honestly I can't tell

At the time of the incident, the police had medical personnel come, and the ambulance arrives in the course of the video. Comments in the course of the video claim the man is still alive. I don't know whether that's true or not. But press reports say Luis Rodriguez was taken to the hospital and later pronounced dead, which suggests he was still alive at the theatre

The cause of death is unknown pending autopsy. Actual cause of death would be important for determining whether police were responsible for the death: for example, did he die of physical suffocation (in which case one might have expected him dead at the scene), some lung reaction to pepper spray, from trauma attributable to a beating, from an aneurism, from a cardiac event, or what?

Diagnoses by anonymous internet posters don't help