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A young black man lying naked on thorns, handcuffed, dragged to a dumpster to die in the fierce heat [1]
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Date: 2023-02-06
Phoenix, Arizona
A nineteen-year-old black man in Phoenix, Arizona, died on June 10, 2022, by inhaling his own vomit and heat stress from air temperatures of 112 F and surface temperatures as high as 140 F in an early heatwave. The man’s name was Caleb Blair, and his death received little media coverage. Thanks to an exhaustive investigation into his death by the Guardian, until now.
The young man died after stumbling into a convenience store and begging the cashier to let him stay in the air conditioning. He was not allowed to stay and stumbled back outside and collapsed. Store employees and customers drove by and walked past the troubled teenager rolling on the ground in a fetal position gasping for oxygen. No one assisted. Still, they did call the police an hour after watching Caleb's death throes from the store's windows, and authorities showed up within minutes.
The Guardian wrote his death was “a very American death’ as the young black man who disrobed in a futile effort to cool his body was handcuffed, dragged eighty-two feet away, and tossed in the thorny leaves of a shady mesquite tree located near a dumpster.
Nina Lakhani writes in The Guardian:
The first police car arrived at 2.56pm and an officer instructed Caleb to get down on the ground. Seconds later, body camera footage shows Caleb sitting with his pants around his ankles, knees bent and hands outstretched behind him, in a sort of reverse bridge position. An officer can be heard describing Caleb as “pretty altered, ” adding there was “no sign of a weapon”. More police vehicles arrived on the scene. Caleb did a forward roll on the asphalt, jumped up, and officers grabbed his arms. “We don’t want any trouble, just trying to help you out,” one said. Caleb was then handcuffed and dragged 25 metres to a shady mesquite tree with his pants still around his ankles. He was sitting bare-legged on the dusty ground covered in thorny leaves, the belt removed from his faded jeans. An officer repeatedly asked his name, but Caleb didn’t respond. The video shows that his breathing was shallow and he could not hold up his head. A couple of minutes later, the paramedics arrived and Caleb seems unresponsive to light. At 3.04pm, officers laid him flat on the ground, removed the handcuffs and pulled up his pants. He did not have a pulse, and at 3.07pm the paramedics started chest compressions. Caleb was dying. According to Phoenix police, he was transferred to a local hospital where he died from his injuries. Over the course of eight months, the Guardian interviewed Caleb’s family and teachers, reviewed hours of police body camera and audio evidence, CCTV footage and autopsy reports obtained through freedom of information requests, spoke to medical experts and visited places where Caleb had lived and died. The medical examiner found that Caleb Blair’s death was caused by drug intoxication, with extreme heat and pneumonia identified as contributing factors. (The heat exhaustion or the drugs, maybe both, probably messed with Caleb’s gag reflex, causing him to inhale vomit, resulting in acute pneumonia.) But after watching the video footage over and over again, Caleb’s father believes that his son died handcuffed on the dusty ground. “My son took his last breath naked in handcuffs next to a dumpster,” says Frank Blair, 60. “He was clearly in medical distress but was rolling around outside in the heat before anyone called for help. He didn’t need handcuffs, he needed help. But this is the best a Black man can hope for – people don’t see us.”
Before his death, Caleb was banging his head on a car door owned by one of the store employees in her call to the police. “Another 911 caller reported a man in “medical distress.” “I can see that his foot is cut, he just puked, it looks like it might be blood. He’s been doubled over hitting his head on the ground.” A third caller said: “He’s squatting down between cars, he’s obviously on something, beating the ground … it’s an African American male, he’s got a shoe in his mouth currently, pants around his ankles … he’s pulling his own hair.”
If there was anyone to blame, it was the employees at that store who kicked him out of the air conditioning and then watched him suffer in agony for over an hour.
The family was left with “the untimely passing of a Black teenager whose potential was cut short by drug addiction, mental illness, homelessness, indifference, and the climate crisis.
The rest of the article focused on the nineteen-year-old man’s troubled life and his family's effort to help him. It is believed that fentanyl was the trigger that initiated this painful episode. The Guardian spent eight months investigating the death of Caleb. The story is worthy of a read.
Phoenix had 339 heat-related deaths during six months in 2022; at least 130 were homeless.
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