For more than five hours, not a single law enforcement officer was able to determine that a 50-year-old Black man in their custody had suffered a stroke after he drove his car into oncoming traffic and was confused and incoherent when questioned by responding police in Minnesota last year.
As a result, Kingsley Fife Bimpong, a U.S. postal worker from Ghana, died a slow death while trained law enforcement officers insisted he was high on drugs, even administering Narcan to him on three occasions, which is an opioid overdose reversal medication, but had no effect on him.
Last week, a 72-page lawsuit was filed by Bimpong’s estate against several officers from the Eagan Police Department and the Dakota County Jail, accusing them of several civil rights violations for jailing Bimpong while denying him access to medical care.
His estate includes his cousin from Ghana, Josephine Adu-Gyane, and the mother of his minor child, Rosalind Marie Lewis.
“As our complaint alleges, the police and correctional officers acted on incorrect and unfounded assumptions about Kingsley as justification for treating a person suffering from classic stroke symptoms with callous indifference that resulted in his death,” said Katie Bennett, who is the lead attorney on the case, according to a statement on the firm’s website.
“The shocking deliberate indifference from local authorities stripped Kingsley of his last safeguard: the right to basic medical care.”
“No one should lose their life in custody simply because those responsible choose silence and neglect over compassion and responsibility. A jail cell should never become a death sentence simply because cries for help were ignored.”
Listed as defendants in the lawsuit are Eagan police officers Joseph Moseng, Martin Jensen, and Liam O’Shea, as well as Dakota County corrections officers Eduardo Decache, Brittany Corbin, Ramsey Strickland, Manuel Hernandez, Heather Hedden, Christopher Severson, and Lucio Manuel Marquez Zazueta — all of whom insisted that Bimpong was under the influence instead of suffering a medical emergency.
An autopsy conducted by the Ramsey County Medical Examiner determined the Black man died because of a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, which requires immediate medical attention to prevent death.
The autopsy found no drugs or alcohol in his system other than the medication he was administered while at the hospital.
Much of the interaction between Bimpong and law enforcement officers was captured on body cameras and jail surveillance video, which is described in detail in the lawsuit but which has not been made public by the law firm for unexplained reasons.
However, local media obtained some of the video and included portions of it in their reports.
‘No Smell of Alcohol’
The incident took place around 10:42 p.m. on Nov. 16, 2024, after Bimpong left work early because he had a headache and decreased vision, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court on Oct. 9.
As he was driving home, Eagan police officer Moseng observed him making a left turn on a red turn signal into oncoming traffic, driving his car onto the center median.
According to the lawsuit filed on Oct. 9:
Upon first contact, it was obvious something was very wrong, and the evidence of Kingsley’s disconcerting condition only increased with each passing moment.
Kingsley was very confused.
Kingsley could not tell Moseng what was happening and could not articulate a complete sentence or thought. Instead, Kingsley kept repeating short phrases such as: “I want to go…” and “I don’t know…”
Kingsley could not tell Moseng the simplest of facts – his own name, where he was coming from, where he was going, or where he lived.
The complaint states that Bimpong eventually stepped out of the car but stumbled and was off-balance and still did not appear to understand what was going on. Eagan police officer O’Shea then pulled up and did a background search on Kingsley, determining he had no criminal record.
Moseng then contacted Jensen – who is considered an expert in recognizing drug use and is supposedly trained in how to “[d]etermine if an individual is impaired by drug(s), alcohol, a combination of both, or if they suffer from an injury or illness to show similar signs of impairment,” according to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety which conducts the training.
In fact, Jensen is one of only 323 certified officers out of 11,000 sworn officers in Minnesota that have received such training — less than three percent of all cops in the state.
The lawsuit states that both Jensen and Moseng muted their body cameras when discussing the situation, something they would do several times throughout the evening which was a violation of departmental policy, the claim states.
However, O’Shea’s body camera captured part of the conversation between the two other cops, including Moseng telling Jensen “there’s no smell of alcohol” and that Moseng was “still not convinced that this isn’t medical related more than impairment related,” the claim states.
In fact, video from the early morning hours of November 17 – video that Moseng also attempted but failed to hide, as detailed more below – indicates that before Jensen’s arrival to the scene at 10:52 pm, Moseng had concluded Kingsley was suffering from a stroke.
Ignoring what they knew and had observed, Moseng, Jensen, and O’Shea consciously chose to proceed with the stop and eventual arrest of Kingsley absent any evidence of intoxication.
Jensen, despite his significant additional DRE training – his purported purpose at the scene, failed to go through the 12 drug recognition evaluation steps.
Jensen ignored his training, which instructed him to conduct the 12-step process in the same manner each time to help ensure no mistakes were made and to eliminate extraneous or unreliable indicators
Meanwhile, both O’Shea and Moseng searched Bimpong’s car and found no drugs or alcohol, but he was still handcuffed and transported to jail more than two hours after he was first questioned by police.
And Jensen, who did not follow training protocols to determine if Kingsley was truly intoxicated, determined with no evidence that the Black man was under the influence of a dissociative drug like ketamine.
‘Lying in His Own Urine’
Bimpong remained in jail for almost three-and-a-half hours without receiving medical care from the jailhouse nurse as he lay dying on the jail cell floor in his own urine.
The lawsuit describes in graphic detail Kingsley’s ordeal inside the cell as corrections officers walked by several times and did nothing.
After approximately 15 minutes in his cell, Kingsley stumbled, limped, and bounced off the wall – finally making it to the toilet area. Kingsley hit his head on the partition wall of the toilet area. Then, Kingsley sat on the toilet for several minutes.
Upon his initial attempt to stand up off the toilet, Kingsley fell backwards onto the toilet. Upon his second attempt to stand up off the toilet, Kingsley stumbled and then fell to the ground, with his underwear and pants down.
Kingsley’s underwear and pants remained down, below his buttocks, for some time as he rolled around on the floor of his cell.
After approximately 5 minutes on the ground, Kinglsey reached out towards the cell door as if for help. No help would come.
The individually named Dakota County Defendants repeatedly watched as Kingsley suffered – mostly writhing on the floor of his Jail cell, lying in his own urine – over the next 3 hours and 24 minutes until he was unresponsive, cold to the touch, and foaming at the mouth in his cell around 4:33 am on November 17, 2024.
It was only when Kingsley was on death’s door that Jail and medical staff entered his cell.
More than five-and-a-half hours after he first came in contact with police, Bimpong was finally transported to the hospital, where doctors determined him to be brain-dead. Bimpong’s family members, some of whom live in Ghana, made the decision to disconnect him from the ventilator.
He was pronounced dead at 12:23 p.m. on November 19, 2024, less than three days after he was arrested.
In response to the lawsuit, the city of Eagan issued a press release trying to blame Bimpong for his death because he did not inform the officers he was suffering a stroke.
On November 16, 2024, an Eagan police officer observed a vehicle traveling the wrong way into oncoming traffic. The driver, later identified as Kingsley Bimpong, was stopped by officers out of concern for his safety and that of others on the road.
During the traffic stop, Mr. Bimpong was asked, and denied, having any medical conditions that could explain his erratic behavior. Mr. Bimpong appeared to be impaired but did not display signs of a serious medical emergency.
An officer trained as a Drug Recognition Evaluator (DRE) responded to the scene. DREs are not emergency medical responders, not medical professionals; their evaluations are designed to determine whether an individual may be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, not to diagnose medical conditions.
Due to Mr. Bimpong’s apparent intoxication, he was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Officers summoned MHealth paramedics, who observed Mr. Bimpong for approximately 17 minutes before he was transported to the Dakota County Jail. Hours after Eagan officers departed, it was discovered that Mr. Bimpong tragically suffered a fatal stroke.
But what the press release from the city neglects to say is that Jensen failed to use his DRE training to make an accurate assessment of Bimpong’s condition, evidently using his imagination instead by accusing him of being under the influence of ketamine. Otherwise, Bimpong would likely still be alive.
However, this is hardly an isolated incident, as Atlanta Black Star has reported multiple times, including the time a cop beat, punched and tasered a man suffering a diabetic episode in a Walmart parking lot and the time another cop punched and dragged a man for not complying while suffering an epileptic seizure, as well as another cop punching and tasering a man for not complying while also suffering an epileptic seizure following a car crash.
“Kingsley’s death should have been prevented by the individually named Defendants, who interacted with him during the critical hours on November 16-17, 2024,” the claim states.
“Instead, Defendants acted on incorrect and unfounded assumptions about Kingsley as justification for treating a person suffering from classic stroke signs and symptoms with callous indifference that resulted in his death.”
