Five months after a Newark man died in police custody, his family says they have no answers

The handcuffed Newark man struggled to breathe, saliva dripping from his mouth as he sat perched on a highway guardrail, where city police officers had placed him while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

Not long before, 43-year-old Raul L. DeJesus had run from an officer who approached him near his home concerning a shooting in Paterson. Authorities caught up with him at a debris-strewn embankment off busy Interstate 280, where DeJesus was taken into custody as he huddled facedown and unmoving in the leaves.

For the next 13 minutes, body camera video shows DeJesus’ condition deteriorating, his eyes closing, his face contorting in pain and spit dripping from his mouth. “I can’t breathe,” the largely silent and unresponsive man told officers at one point.

Monday marks five months since DeJesus’ Jan. 5 death in police custody, which the state Attorney General’s Office is investigating. But in that time, his family charges, they have received no answers from authorities to their many questions surrounding his demise.

“It’s just a lot,” said DeJesus’ brother, Edwin Simmons. “We are trying to get to the bottom of it.”

The Attorney General’s Office has said DeJesus collapsed and later died after a foot chase with police. He had fled a Newark officer who approached him at 3:42 p.m. at Orange and South 11th streets in connection with a homicide in Paterson on Dec. 10, the office says.

But authorities have not released DeJesus’ cause of death or said whether he was a suspect, a person of interest or a potential witness in the Paterson case. DeJesus was pronounced dead at University Hospital at 4:41 p.m., roughly an hour after his initial encounter with police.

In a statement Thursday, state authorities disputed that they have not been forthcoming with DeJesus’ family, saying they have met with them on “multiple occasions” and place the “highest priority” on communicating with families and being responsive to their questions.

It is “important to note that though we strive for transparency as much as possible, investigators cannot share the details of evidence collection or witness statements with family members during an ongoing grand jury investigation,” said the statement released by Sharon Lauchaire, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office.

The office referred NJ Advance Media’s inquiries about the Paterson shooting to the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Catherine Adams, a spokesperson for Newark police, declined comment, citing the state’s probe. Jeffrey Weber, the president of the Newark Fraternal Order of Police, did not return a phone call.

Simmons, 51, of Newark, said he is hardly anti-law enforcement. He is a retired corrections officer at Northern State Prison and said his son works as a corrections officer there and his daughter is a cop in East Orange. But Simmons said he believes police failed his brother that day and are not being held responsible for it.

“Clearly, it was caused and created by their actions,” Simmons said.

An attorney for the family, Luretha Stribling, said they want to view the entire body camera footage surrounding DeJesus’ arrest and receive a better explanation for why he was stopped in the first place. She said the redacted video clips that have been released show DeJesus was clearly in medical distress. Yet, emergency services did not quickly arrive at a scene minutes from University Hospital, she said.

“There is not a lot of information that has been provided, and that’s what the family wants,” Stribling said.

Many families have voiced that complaint about police-involved deaths, an NJ Advance Media investigation found in February. Under a 2019 law, the Attorney General’s Office investigates all such deaths and must present them to a grand jury to determine whether officers acted appropriately. But both the pace and the transparency of those probes have faced criticism, with grieving families charging they are being kept in the dark about what happened to their loved ones.

In Lauchaire’s statement, the Attorney General’s Office said it is considering steps to improve communications.

The office is “looking at ways to provide more information to families about the investigation process while the matter is pending, about the evidence that the investigation revealed as well as the applicable legal principles if the grand jury determines that no criminal charges should be brought,” the statement said.

In DeJesus’ case, the body cam video shows that more than 15 police officers were present during his final moments. When he was taken into custody, officers carried him by the arms and legs down the hilly embankment toward westbound I-280.

“Relax. Relax. Try to relax, bro,” one officer told him as saliva drooled from his mouth.

“Just breathe. Because an ambulance is coming for you,” another said.

Minutes later, police searched DeJesus’ pockets for identification, with his head lolling as they did so. Traffic sped by in the background as other cops milled about the shoulder of the highway and an officer remarked that DeJesus’ breathing was shallow.

“Hey, try to breathe for me, all right?” police told him.

The footage ended as an ambulance arrived.

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Riley Yates may be reached at ryates@njadvancemedia.com.