Kerwin Harris' son, Kerwin Harris Jr., in St. Louis in September 2024 (Clara Bates/Missouri Independent).
Kerwin Harris' heart beat for the last time as he lay on the ground of a residential St. Louis street.
Harris was chased, pinned face-down and held in a carotid-artery chokehold by then-St. Louis police officer Steven Pinkerton, who thought he matched the description of a robber-at-large.
Another officer used a Taser to shock him six times.
When officers finally handcuffed him and rolled him to his back, Harris' body was limp. Police couldn't find a pulse. Soon after midnight on Dec. 23, 2012, Harris -- a Black 39-year-old father of two -- was declared dead.
The police later concluded he wasn't involved in the robbery.
The St. Louis medical examiner's office eventually ruled Harris's death was an accident caused primarily by heart disease.
The death didn't spur protests, lawsuits or media scrutiny.
A St. Louis cop sent a Black man to prison, but the jury never heard about the officer's past
The Independent began looking into the 2012 death as part of a months-long investigation into the case of another Black man from St. Louis, Kurtis Watkins, who was convicted of charges related to a shooting based on the testimony of a single eyewitness: Officer Steven Pinkerton.
Watkins and his lawyers never learned about Pinkerton's involvement in Harris' arrest and death, which legal experts agree could have been used to challenge his credibility at trial.
Harris' family, too, was largely kept in the dark about the circumstances of his death. They were suspicious of the police account but had no evidence to the contrary. They were never given the medical examiner's report or the police report.
Three longtime forensic pathologists who agreed to review the records for The Independent said Harris' death should have been ruled a homicide, not an accident.
Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner who estimates he's conducted more than 20,000 autopsies in his career, said Harris died because the officer's pressure on his neck and back, as he lay on his stomach, left him unable to breathe.
It's true Harris' autopsy showed high blood pressure, a marker of heart disease, "but hypertensive heart disease had nothing to do with his cause of death," Baden said. "His cause of death was the way he was restrained, so that's asphyxia -- and that's not an accident, that's a homicide."
"Homicide," in the medical examiners' context, refers to how a death came about, not whether a crime occurred.
Baden said Harris' death resulted from "a textbook case of neck and back restraint." In that regard, he said, "it's really very much like the George Floyd case, and also the Eric Garner case," referring to two high-profile deaths in police chokeholds and prone-position restraints that spurred protests, the former in Minneapolis in 2020 and the latter in New York City in 2014.
Dr. Joye Carter, a former Washington, D.C., chief medical examiner, said the injuries in the autopsy report are "consistent with use of force and pressure to the neck," particularly on the larynx and internal neck structure.
"I am kind of surprised, in a way, that they would just jump over to 'this is an accident,'" Carter said, "because anyone can say they didn't mean to kill somebody. That doesn't make it an accident."
Tara Rick, the executive director of operations for the St. Louis Medical Examiner's Office, said all staff involved in Harris' case have either left the agency or retired, so "I can't answer any questions about what they wrote or what they were thinking or where they got the information, those types of things, other than what is stated in the report."
Pinkerton did not respond to multiple requests for comment and appeared to block an Independent reporter on Facebook after several messages went unanswered.
Seeing the paperwork about how his father died for the first time in April, Harris' son, Kerwin Jr., now 34, said the unanswered questions surrounding the death had been consuming him for years.
"They took everything from me," he said. "My dad was my world."
Nicole Phillips, a sister of Kerwin Sr., described him as the "nucleus of our family" -- generous, quick to laugh, the family member everyone sought out for advice.
Though she wasn't surprised to read what happened the night of his death -- she hadn't trusted the police narrative -- she said it still felt wrong to be learning about it from a reporter 12 years after the fact.
"That's the injustice of all of it," Phillips said.
The morning of Dec. 22, 2012, a Denny's restaurant in St. Louis was robbed of $109. The robber told witnesses he had explosives, according to the police report.
That night, Pinkerton was starting an overnight shift, he later wrote in a police report. He had stopped at a QuikTrip gas station to buy a drink and go to the restroom when he saw a gold Buick Century in the parking lot.
It was the same model of car that the Denny's robber had escaped in.
In the car was Harris, who was, like the robber, Black and wearing a dark knit hat and glasses.
Pinkerton ran Harris' license plate which "revealed no theft on the primary screen," according to the police report. As he was waiting for more information and preparing to notify the dispatcher of a possible robbery suspect, Harris started his car engine.
Pinkerton put on his emergency lights and blocked Harris from backing up. Harris got out and began to run away, according to Pinkerton's arrest report.
"I believed I was pursuing a robbery suspect," Pinkerton later wrote.
In several respects, Harris didn't match witnesses' description of the Denny's robber. Harris was at least 80 pounds heavier, according to his autopsy alongside witness descriptions. He was also at least two inches taller. The robber wore a green cap, but Harris wore a black one.
In the course of running, Harris' pants slipped down so Pinkerton could see that he didn't have a gun in the back of his waistband, he later wrote. Pinkerton tackled him.
Pinkerton became worried that Harris was trying to retrieve a weapon from his torso or the front of his waistband.
That belief was "due to the presence of what I believed was a large amount of 'crack cocaine,' combined with him matching the description of a robbery suspect who was alleged to have been armed with explosives," Pinkerton wrote.
Other officers soon responded to Pinkerton's call for aid. A witness said she overheard Pinkerton tell the other officers that Harris' car was "at the QuikTrip with a bomb in it," according to an interview included in the police report.
Pinkerton, according to the later police report, began hitting the side of Harris' face with an open fist to try to render him temporarily unconscious.
"Kerwin H. continued his strenuous resistance and appeared to gain strength with each successive cycle of strikes and commands," Pinkerton wrote.
However, several witnesses who lived at a nearby apartment building told detectives they didn't see Harris resisting. One witness told a detective she heard Pinkerton cursing at Harris and calling him the N-word.
The department didn't begin using body cameras until 2020, and there is no dashboard-camera footage from the arrest.
Pinkerton wrote that he decided to apply a chokehold to Harris because of his continued resistance.
Five years earlier, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department had banned the neck restraint called a carotid chokehold, which reduces blood to the brain and is designed to render someone temporarily unconscious. It is considered deadly force, which must be justified by an officer's reasonable fear of serious physical injury or death.
Pinkerton reported that he feared for his life in case Harris was "able to retrieve a weapon," so he applied the chokehold for around 15 to 20 seconds.
Another officer, Timothy McNamara, shocked Harris six times with a Taser directly against his skin. Protocol according to agency guidelines at the time was to use a Taser a maximum of three times, barring an unusual circumstance, and McNamara said in the report he thought he'd only done it three times.
McNamara, through the department's media spokesperson, declined to comment. He is still working at the St. Louis Metro Police, the spokesperson confirmed.
When Harris was finally handcuffed, the officers rolled him over and he "became limp," Pinkerton wrote. He was bleeding from his mouth, Pinkerton wrote, "which I found to be unusual."
The officers checked for a heartbeat and found none. They administered CPR.
Harris was taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital and pronounced dead after midnight on Dec. 23.
Pinkerton said he applied the chokehold because he believed that Harris had robbed Denny's and that he was armed. Both beliefs turned out to be incorrect. Harris was not the robber -- that case remains open -- and he had no weapon.
Later that morning, the day before Christmas Eve, Harris' sister Nicole received a call: A homicide detective had called her mother, her niece relayed, and the family needed to go identify Kerwin.
Nicole didn't understand why the police would need them to identify her brother. She assumed he was arrested.
Harris had a criminal record -- several drug charges and one misdemeanor third-degree assault charge -- and had been sentenced to supervised probation, according to Missouri court records.
When Nicole relayed the call to her supervisor and said the words homicide detective, "his face dropped."
Harris' brother, Frank, got a call from his younger brother, saying Kerwin had passed away. He started calling all the hospitals in town, asking if Harris was a patient there. He couldn't grasp that his brother was already gone.
At around 11 that morning, the family members gathered at the medical examiner's office. A detective escorted them to the conference room.
According to the family members and the medical examiner's full case file obtained by The Independent, a detective and staff member from the medical examiner's office stood at the front of the room. They displayed a photo of Harris' body on the screen that a detective had taken at the hospital earlier that morning.
"Is this Mr. Harris right here?" Nicole remembers someone asking.
It was.
The family wasn't allowed to view his body because it was being examined by the pathologist, the medical examiner's office investigator wrote in the report.
Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: [email protected].