The family of Daryl Vance, a Black man who beat cancer twice yet died two months before his 71st birthday after a Detroit police officer punched him in the head, is suing the city, the former officer and a sergeant for $50 million.
The lawsuit filed on Feb. 29 claims former officer Juwan Brown and Sgt. Jarmiare McEntire violated Vance’s civil rights on Sept. 1, 2023, when Brown punched him in the left temple during a confrontation outside the Garden Bowl bowling alley and restaurant in midtown Detroit.
The deadly use of force was so intense that Vance’s head slammed into the pavement, “causing irreparable and fatal brain damage,” according to the lawsuit.
After being on life support for 20 days, Vance died in the hospital on Sept. 21 after doctors determined he’d never regain consciousness or breathe on his own. The severe blow to his head and the loss of oxygen after he went unconscious had caused a “complete suppression of brain waves,” the lawsuit stated.
Brown, 29, was fired from the Detroit Police Department and faced a manslaughter charge in connection with Vance’s death, but a district court judge dismissed the case in January after deciding prosecutors didn’t provide enough probable cause to send the case to trial, The Detroit News reported.
The lawsuit says the former officer violated Vance’s due process rights under the 14th Amendment after failing to render medical aid during the first 20 minutes the man was unconscious and not breathing.
Leading up to the incident, Vance had taken an Uber around 3 p.m. from his Highland Park apartment to the bowling alley, where he sat at the bar over the next few hours, according to the complaint.
Eyewitnesses said Vance was “friendly” and “soft-spoken” but appeared “sad,” and Vance later told a bartender he was “having a bad day” and feeling down about a friend in hospice care, the lawsuit said.
Things began escalating around 6:30 p.m. that day after Vance told a bartender he thought someone had stolen his bag while he was in the restroom.
After an upset Vance raised his voice, security asked him to leave and management called police to report an “unruly customer,” according to the document.
Eyewitnesses said Vance found his bag before leaving the bowling alley. When Brown got there around 6:40 p.m., Vance was outside the establishment on a public sidewalk.
Brown’s body camera showed him approaching Vance as the man asked the officer who he was while starting to walk down the sidewalk.
“Officer Brown then pushed Vance in the stomach and said, ‘these kind people don’t want you here, so you got to go,’” the lawsuit states.
An already agitated Vance became more upset and yelled profanities at Brown, and rather than attempting de-escalation techniques, the former officer pointed his Taser at Vance, who was about 5 feet away, and said, “I’m gonna light you up, come on.”
The suit claims Vance said without moving toward the officer, “I’m gonna knock your muthaf— jaw…you put your hands on me.”
Brown responded, saying that he’d either break Vance’s jaw or Vance would walk away. The body camera footage showed Vance did not physically threaten either Brown or a nearby bowling alley employee, according to the complaint.
Brown then pushed Vance backward into a passerby, according to the lawsuit, causing him to lose balance. Vance then turned and walked away from Brown, saying the area was a bus stop.
Brown told him it wasn’t a bus stop and suggested Vance leave. The former officer then pushed Vance on his left shoulder blade, causing the man to turn toward him and throw his hands up “in frustration and anger,” the complaint states.
The former officer then jabbed Vance in the stomach and “squared up in a fighting stance.”
The lawsuit says Brown then charged at Vance, causing the 70-year-old to stumble backward toward the curb and put his hands on the “shoulders or chest” of Brown, which eyewitnesses said was done “in self-defense and/or caused by loss of balance.”
“According to eyewitnesses and the [body camera], at no time did Vance hit, punch, slap, smack or otherwise offensively attack” Brown, according to the complaint.
Brown then punched Vance on the left side of his face, causing him to fall on the ground and his head to hit the brick parking lane. Vance was briefly conscious but then passed out, lying unconscious for 20 minutes before first responders arrived.
“At no time during the 20 minutes while Vance was in respiratory arrest did … Brown check Vance’s vital signs, render any medical assistance, perform [CPR] or any basic first aid,” the lawsuit states. Without oxygen flow and CPR before paramedics arrived, Vance suffered a cardiac arrest and “severe hypoxic-ischemic brain damage.”
The suit also claims the Detroit Police Department’s supervisors and investigators who arrived at the scene wrote false and misleading witness accounts, and at least one witness reported refusing to sign a statement because “it was an inaccurate account” of what happened.
“Police brutality has no place in our society,” James Harrington, an attorney for Vance’s family, said in a statement to The Detroit News. “What former Officer Brown did to Mr. Vance was nothing short of reckless and malicious police brutality.”
