Sacramento Police Show Video of a Man Who Died in Police Custody While Being Handcuffed in a Patrol Car

Sacramento police shared video Thursday from an encounter with a man who died last month while being handcuffed and sitting in a patrol car. The man was said to be high on drugs.

Just before 4:15 p.m. on July 23, police were called to the 3600 block of Jasmine Street in East Del Paso Heights to make sure someone was okay. According to the video, James Dehart’s mother called the police to say that her son had run away while he might have been high on meth and was making threats to hurt himself.

But Dehart came back when the mother called the cops again to say her son needed help from a psychiatrist. The mother told the cops that her son had been hallucinating the night before when he woke her up and said someone with a gun broke into their house.

The mother told the police, “He’s acting strange out in the driveway,” as seen on the tape. “I’m scared, so I haven’t gone outside to find him and talk to him.”

According to the 19-minute video that was released, she later said she was scared of her son because he is “in that shape” and needs “psychiatric help before he does something bad to himself.” A department official narrated the video. When police officers’ names are called out, the video mutes the sound and blurs their faces when body-worn camera footage is shown.

The police talked to Dehart for a short time before he ran away while throwing a knife to the ground, as seen in the video.

Officer Anthony Gamble, a spokesman for the Police Department, said in the video that Dehart locked himself in a car and that police tried to get him to leave for about seven minutes.

Dehart gets out of the car and starts to scream as cops try to put his hands behind his back. The film shows that two police officers turned Dehart over and put his hands behind his back as he fell to the ground.

Dehart screamed the whole time they picked him up and carried him to a police car, where they put him in the back.

Sacramento firefighters were sent to the area to help with the injuries. A video from inside the patrol car shows that Dehart wasn’t responding to the firemen as they checked his blood pressure and felt for a pulse.

A doctor said Dehart was dead after he was taken there, Gamble said.

At first, the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office said that Dehart’s death was “undetermined.”

The death is being looked into by the Police Department’s murder unit, internal affairs division, and professional standards unit. The review is also being watched by the Office of Public Safety Accountability in the city of Sacramento and the Office of the District Attorney for Sacramento County.