From KATU.com, October 31, 2006

Mayor Potter says he is seeking $500,000 in hopes of getting all Portland police officers additional training on how to deal with people with mental health issues following a fatal incident in September.

From the Oregonian, October 28, 2006 – not online

Stories of eccentricities, poems and songs that family and friends shared in a memorial vigil for “Jim-Jim” Friday night brought to life a man now more noted for his death in Portland police custody.

James P. Chasse Jr. died Sept. 17 after police spotted him acting strangely in the Pearl District, chased him when he ran away, then knocked him down and struggled to arrest him. Numerous broken ribs punctured a lung, and an autopsy found Chasse died of blunt force trauma to the chest.

Chasse , 42, was schizophrenic.

At the vigil, titled “Love One Another,” at the First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ, speakers shared remembrances of Chasse and pleas for justice with the more than 300 people attending.

His father, James P. “Jim” Chasse Sr., said his son was “always the kind of person that dogs loved” and who “took spiders outside where they belonged.”

“In the end, our prayer for us all is to remember that we are the ones who can spread the tolerance for diverse people living in frustrating circumstances,” the father said.

His brother, Mark Chasse, noted that Chasse ‘s favorite holidays were Halloween and Christmas. He credited his big brother with saving him from drowning in a pool before a lifeguard even noticed.

Chasse ‘s mother, Linda Gerber, said, “That such a sweet, gentle man should die so violently and so senselessly is a great tragedy.”

Friends from Chasse ‘s teen years spoke of him as a well-loved figure in an emerging Portland punk rock scene of loners in the late ’70s. They read letters and poems Chasse had written.

You and me
we went to tea
we poured out tea
quite evenly.
Yesaroo

Mental illness took away much of Chasse ‘s clarity, friends said, recalling how he at one time claimed to be a reincarnation of Joan of Arc. But he remained sweet and innocent, they said.

A song a friend wrote about him, titled “Nothing to Fear,” was played during the vigil.

You don’t realize the colors you shine.
You’re an abstract painting without any straight lines.

[Nothing to Fear, a song for Jim Jim, by the Neo Boys - 1979]
Neo Boys – Nothing To Fear (For Jim Jim)

Several speakers spoke of the public’s desire for justice for Chasse and called his death unnecessary.

“He did not deserve to be murdered for being crazy,” said friend X J Elliott.

Mark Lasley, 51, of Portland never met Chasse or his family but said he attended the vigil to protest police actions.

“[Chasse] didn’t hurt them. It’s just not right,” Lasley said.

In an earlier interview, Jason Renaud, secretary of the Mental Health Association of Portland and a high school friend of Chasse’s, said the vigil was a chance to do more than mourn Chasse. Those attending could display how much of the community is connected to someone who may have appeared transient or destitute.

Renaud contended that Chasse didn’t die because of a mental health crisis or a health system problem, but rather of police action. He hoped the vigil could raise awareness of the need for people to feel safe in public and confident of their police force.

The family asked that donations in memory of Chasse be made to Portland’s Operation Nightwatch, a charity for the homeless, or the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

From The Portland Tribune, Oct 27, 2006

Portland police officer Christopher Humphreys, involved last month in the death of James Chasse Jr., was named in a federal lawsuit alleging police brutality that the city settled for $90,000 earlier this year.

And in instances of use of force, Humphreys is tied for No. 2 within the police bureau since it began collecting those statistics in 2004, according to records obtained by the Portland Tribune.

The city admitted no fault in the settlement. Humphreys and other officers were dismissed from the lawsuit as a condition of the payout.

But one witness to the altercation said in court testimony that the man being arrested was so badly beaten he could only describe him as a “breathing corpse.”

Humphreys has used force more times — 78 — than all but one other Portland cop since late 2004. Another cop involved in the Chasse incident, Sgt. Kyle Nice, has 17 recorded uses of force in that time, which does not make him stand out statistically.

Humphreys also has been the subject of seven Internal Affairs Division complaints — one for each of his years on the force — with two of those cases still open. One of those relates to Chasse. Such complaints and details of the ensuing investigations generally are not considered public records. Nice, a 14-year veteran, has had two such complaints, including the Chasse case.

Like Humphreys, Nice also has had a use-of-force issue that led to a lawsuit.

In the lawsuits against both Humphreys and Nice, people accused them of excessive force, Humphreys for using his baton on a man’s legs, Nice for shooting a man in the left arm.

Police filed criminal charges against both men they were trying to arrest, and juries cleared each of them. They each later filed federal civil lawsuits. A jury found in favor of the city and Nice in the lawsuit filed against them.

Humphreys did not return a phone call or an e-mail seeking comment. Nice is out of town until next week and did not respond to requests for comment.

“Referencing the recent traumatic incident, you surely must recognize the psychological impact it has had on each of these officers,” Nice’s direct supervisor, Lt. Mike Lee, wrote in an e-mail. “With that in mind, I would be surprised if either of them was willing to speak with any reporter at this time.”

These are the stories of lawsuits involving Humphreys and Nice, reconstructed through court and police documents, which include interviews with and sworn testimony from the officers involved.

The man in the driveway was getting worked over. The neighbors watching had no doubts about that.

Across Southeast 85th Avenue, John Repp watched through his living room window.

What he heard sounded like “Sylvester Stallone in ‘Rocky,’ when … he was punching that cow in the meat market. If you took a stick and hit that, it makes kind of a ‘thwack.’ ”

He heard the man on the ground screaming as police officers punched, kicked and hit him with a metal baton.

“It was terrible to hear,” Repp said, “ … the guy was screaming for his life.”

Like other witnesses, Repp said he could not make out what the officers were telling the man, Chaz Miller. The officers said their commands were consistent — “Stop resisting!” or “Stop moving!” — but to most of the witnesses it just sounded like noise.

Deputy District Attorney Sean Riddell asked one witness, Mark Parkinson, whether Miller was struggling, resisting arrest.

“Now, would you think that Rodney King was struggling when he was just trying to get to his feet?” Parkinson asked in return. “Because what I saw was him laying on the ground being beat. I did not see him struggling. I saw him laying on the ground being beat.”

In the early morning of April 21, 2003, Humphreys drove his patrol car to 3205 S.E. 87th Ave. and met two other officers, Erik Strohmeyer and Lon Sweeney, who were following up on a domestic violence call a few hours earlier.

According to sworn testimony, a drunken boyfriend went into his girlfriend’s house, angry, and stopped her from calling 911. She tried to Mace him, and he pushed her down and took the canister, then sprayed her instead. She called the police after he left.

The boyfriend, whom she described as an olive-complexioned man with dark hair, left with a mutual friend, who was blond and fair-skinned. The mutual friend drove a Ford Ranger pickup.

The officers found the Ranger they were looking for, which they thought would contain the boyfriend, Paul Swayze, according to court testimony.

Strohmeyer and Humphreys knocked on the driver’s-side window. The blond man inside stirred, then laid back down. Strohmeyer knocked harder, announcing himself as a police officer and the man slowly sat up. Only later would they find out that he was Miller, the suspect’s friend.

Riddell asked Humphreys during the criminal trial whether the man in the truck made any gestures or movements.

“I knew he shook his head … kind of a side-to-side, like a no motion, … as we were to get him out of the vehicle,” Humphreys said, according to a transcript.

Strohmeyer threatened to break the window with his metal baton, and the man reached slowly toward the ignition.

Strohmeyer broke the window.

Humphreys moved toward the man in the truck and blasted him in the face with pepper spray.

Miller started the car and drove off. Sweeney maneuvered him to a stop a few blocks away.

Civilian witnesses said they saw Strohmeyer punch Miller in the head several times through the broken driver’s-side window, in between yelling at him to get out of the truck.

Humphreys was on the passenger side, trying to pull Miller out by the legs. He couldn’t get a good grip, so he pulled out his baton and began hitting Miller with it on soft tissue below the waist, as he said he was taught to do. He hit Miller with the baton between 10 and 12 times.

Parkinson, one of the neighbors, said he saw Miller, whom he knew, scramble out of the truck and go down in his driveway on Southeast 85th Avenue near Powell Boulevard at about 4:50 a.m.

Parkinson watched through a window as the officers surrounded Miller. Humphreys pulled out his baton again and swung it against Miller’s legs another 10 to 12 times while other officers wrestled with Miller.

Parkinson said he could see Miller clinging with one arm to the rear axle of a truck in Parkinson’s driveway.

Another officer showed up after Humphreys called for a Taser. Two 50,000-volt shocks with the Taser pressed up against Miller failed to subdue him.

“I mean, it basically had no effect … other than making him fight harder,” Humphreys testified.

The officer with the Taser backed up and fired the weapon’s barbed probes into Miller, and police handcuffed Miller.

“Describe what you saw of Miller’s body,” the public defender asked Repp’s son, David, who had watched from his bedroom window.

“A breathing corpse,” he said.

Police charged Miller with attempting to elude police in a vehicle, attempting to elude police on foot, reckless driving, reckless endangerment and resisting arrest. A jury acquitted him. Miller sued the city last year, and in February the city settled the case before trial, agreeing to pay $32,683.96 in damages and $59,485.24 in attorney’s fees.

Ron Barton woke up and got shot. That’s pretty much all he knew until people told him later what happened.

Two Portland cops, Nice and another officer, a rookie, thought he pointed a gun at them. Nice shot Barton in the left arm, sure that Barton aimed a shotgun at him in a right-handed pose.

Barton later passed a polygraph examination in which he said he never touched the gun. He also is left-handed. And lab tests showed no atomized blood on the shotgun, which would have been present if he had been holding it when he was shot.

After he was shot, as he collapsed facedown on the floor in his own blood, he cried out repeatedly, “What did I do?”

It was early in the evening, Aug. 24, 1997. Nice, then an officer, was the second cop to respond to a call of “threats” at 13953 S.E. Division St.

Barton lived in apartment No. 4 and had a running dispute with a neighbor over unauthorized cars taking up space in the parking lot.

Barton had been out with a friend, drinking beer. The neighbor’s mother stopped him in the parking lot when he started writing down license plate numbers.

The mother told Barton to watch out, that her son might shoot him. He told her the kid had better finish the job or he’d come looking for her son. When the son heard that, he called the police.

Barton was asleep — door open but screen door shut — on the couch in his living room. There was a phone next to his head. And when Nice and the rookie peered in, in bad light, they saw the stock of a shotgun on the couch nearby, which Barton later said he bought after being burglarized twice. He stuffed it into the couch cushions, safety on, and hadn’t touched it since, he said.

Nice and the rookie knocked “vigorously” on the door, according to police records, announcing themselves as police. Barton started moving.

Both officers believed that Barton wheeled the shotgun toward them. Nice raised his police bureau-issued Glock handgun, and fired it once through the screen door.

There were no civilian witnesses.

Police charged Barton with two counts of recklessly endangering another person. A jury acquitted him. After the civil trial for the lawsuit he filed afterward, the jury ruled for the city.

From KATU.com, October 26, 2006

According to the Willamette Week newspaper, Portland police officer Christopher Humphreys, who is a seven-year veteran, has used force more often than almost all of the other 785 officers in the bureau. The paper says officer Humphreys ranked in the top five in ‘physical use of force’ categories.

From KATU.com, October 18, 2006

The family of a mentally ill man who died in police custody lashed out at police Wednesday, alleging that they, and the district attorney’s office, hijacked grand jury proceedings to keep officers from facing criminal charges.

A Multnomah County grand jury on Tuesday cleared police in the death of James Chasse Jr., 42, who died Sept. 17 after a struggle with two Portland police officers and a Multnomah County Sheriff’s Deputy. Chasse died while the officers were transporting him to the hospital.

In the autopsy report, it stated that Chasse broke 16 ribs, including some that punctured a lung and caused massive internal bleeding. Toxicology tests showed he had no alcohol or drugs in his system. Despite the autopsy results, the medical examiner ruled Chasse’s death accidental.

Tom Steenson

An attorney for Chasse’s family, Tom Steenson, said Wednesday that authorities twisted the facts of what happened that day.

“We would hope that Chief Sizer and the Police Bureau would stop dispersing false information to the public and be truthful so the community can make its own decision about what happened,” he said.

Steenson contended that Chasse’s injuries did not match the conclusions by the medical examiner. He also claimed there were also inconsistencies in transcripts of officers’ accounts of how they took Chasse into custody. For example, the lawyer pointed out, Portland police officer Christopher Humphreys said he gave Chasse a “really hard shove,” but Sgt. Kyle Nice said Humphreys tackled Chasse and both men landed in the intersection.

Overall, Steenson contended, grand jurors never received an accurate picture of the events surrounding Chasse’s death.

“When the medical examiner is in there telling the grand jury that this was an accident and basing her conclusion on the fact that (one of the officers) fell on Jim – when that’s not the truth – it’s clear that the grand jury, from our point of view, was misled,” Steenson said.

Jim Chasse

“We remain horrified by the callous and completely indifferent ways the police and law enforcement treated James the day he was killed,” said Chasse’s father, James Chasse, Sr.

Steenson said the city needs to send a message with the case.

“In this case it’s about attitude,” he said. “If the city doesn’t take remedial steps and prompt steps to address concerns like this with these officers then there’s no reason for the officers not to continue to exhibit out of control behavior and that’s what they did. They were out of control.”

Steenson left open the possibility of filing a civil lawsuit in connection with the case. He said he also might seek an independent review from an outside agency such the Oregon Attorney General’s Office.

From The Oregonian – October 4, 2006

James P. Chasse Jr., the 42-year-old man who died Sept. 17 after three officers struggled to arrest him, suffered more than a dozen fractured ribs, some that punctured his left lung and caused massive internal bleeding, according to an autopsy report released by his family’s attorney Tuesday.

The state medical examiner’s report revealed 16 of Chasse’s ribs were fractured; 26 individual rib bones in the front and back of his rib cage were broken, splintered or crushed after his initial encounter with two Portland officers and a Multnomah County sheriff’s deputy.

He also suffered multiple bruises, contusions and abrasions to his head, chest and abdomen. Toxicology tests revealed no alcohol or drugs in his system.

Further, a deputy medical examiner’s initial investigative report done the night of Chasse’s death indicates that American Medical Response ambulance medics who first evaluated a handcuffed Chasse on the street said they were not told Chasse may have gone into respiratory arrest, although police called an ambulance because they believed Chasse was unconscious. The medics also said they were unaware officers had used a Taser on Chasse, the report says.

The ambulance medics said they found Chasse conscious and his vital signs in the normal range, and let the police officers decide whether to transport Chasse to a hospital, Dwayne Bigoni, the deputy medical examiner, wrote in a narrative report.

Police then shackled Chasse’s ankles together, tied his feet to his hands in a “hog-tie” and drove him to jail, accusing him of resisting arrest and interfering with police. There, jail nurses determined he needed further medical attention, and police drove Chasse to Portland Adventist Hospital. He died en route.

When Chasse’s body arrived for autopsy, his left chest appeared “flattened,” the report said.

Call for inquest

The state medical examiner, Dr. Karen Gunson, cited blunt-force chest trauma as his cause of death and wrote that the injuries were caused “by another person or a fall.” Gunson ruled the death an accident, but Chasse’s family, witnesses and a police watchdog group has questioned her ruling, and at least one state lawmaker has called for a public inquest into Chasse’s death.

Tom Steenson, the family’s attorney, released the autopsy report because Chasse’s family was disturbed by the extent of the injuries and is continuing its own independent investigation of his death. They highlighted that Chasse, who suffered from schizophrenia, had a slight build, was 5 foot 9 inches tall and weighed 145 pounds.

“Jim had a difficult life, and its end was horribly, horribly unjust,” Mark Chasse said when eulogizing his older brother at a private service on Friday.

The family attorney released the full autopsy report on the first day the Multnomah County district attorney’s office presented the case to a grand jury for review. The grand jury is expected to hear more testimony this morning and make a ruling on whether anyone is criminally liable in Chasse’s death.

Copwatch letter

Dan Handelman, who leads Portland Copwatch, wrote a letter to the district attorney this week demanding that his office present an “aggressive and thorough” case to the grand jury.

“Even if the officers did not intend to kill Mr. Chasse, they should have known that their actions could cause his death,” Handelman wrote. “It seems reasonable that a jury could indict the officers for criminally negligent homicide.”

On Tuesday, District Attorney Michael Schrunk responded to Handelman that the entire grand jury file would be turned over to Chasse’s family upon conclusion of the review. But he cautioned that the grand jury’s role is only to decide the narrow question of criminal liability.

“The answer to this question is not the same as to the one of whether the death was justified or whether anyone is or is not civilly liable in relation to that death,” Schrunk wrote. “It is also not a decision as to whether appropriate procedures or resources are available for the mentally ill in circumstances such as these.”

According to police, officers spotted Chasse acting oddly as if he either were on drugs or had a mental disorder, and then possibly urinating in the street before they walked up to him. When he ran, they chased him. Police said one officer pushed Chasse in the back, “which caused him to stumble to the ground.”

What witnesses saw

Witnesses, though, said three officers forcefully tackled Chasse to the pavement and landed on top of him, then wrestled with him, repeatedly kicking and punching him in the chest and head.

Police say that Chasse tried to bite one officer, and that one officer pulled out a Taser gun and placed it to Chasse’s torso to stun him. Police said the Taser didn’t have an effect. Witnesses said it appeared Chasse went unconscious, and an ambulance and firefighter medics were called.

Portland Police Chief Rosie Sizer had no comment on the autopsy Tuesday. The chief and a supervising sergeant from the Detective Division plan to hold a news conference following the grand jury’s ruling on the police investigation. She told members of the Chief’s Forum on Monday morning that she would not prejudge the officers’ actions until the investigation was done. Portland Sgt. Kyle Nice, Officer Christopher Humphreys and Multnomah County Sheriff’s Deputy Brett Burton remain on paid leave as the investigation continues.

“We have to wait until the grand jury is done,” said Officer Cathe Kent, a police spokeswoman. “The whole point is so the jury hears things firsthand and not backdoors like this.”

Jason Sorrick, spokesman for AMR Ambulance, said he could not discuss the ambulance medics’ actions in regard to Chasse. “Federal privacy rules are pretty clear,” Sorrick said. “We can’t discuss anything in regard to patient care.”

Why the medics would defer to police on whether to take a person they examine to the hospital, Sorrick declined to answer as well. AMR medics declined to be interviewed by Portland detectives investigating the case and had to be subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury.