A father died after being “hogtied” by Mississippi police inside an ambulance despite telling officers he was struggling to breathe, according to his family’s lawyer.
Troy Goode, 30, was taken to the hospital after traveling to a Widespread Panic concert with friends Saturday night at a showground south of Memphis, Tennessee.
The asthmatic died two hours after being placed face down on a stretcher in an incident captured on video by bystander.
“His face was buried in the mattress of the stretcher,” lawyer Tim Edwards told NBC News Monday. “There was a strap over the back of his head so he couldn’t move his head. His hands and feet were hogtied so he couldn’t move those, either.”
Goode was “intoxicated” after he and four friends took something in the parking lot before the concert began said Edwards, who declined to comment on what they may have used. “That’ll be determined by the toxicology screen,” he added. “Whatever was ingested, it was done by all five of them.”
The chemical engineer “got paranoid” and left the concert site even before the gig began. He climbed out of his wife’s car and was “in a field running in circles,” Edwards said. “There was no one around him.”
Cops saw him “running from the area acting strange and not cooperative,” Lt. Mark E. Little from the Southaven, Mississippi, Police Dept. said in a statement.
“Officers attempted to detain the subject who began to resist and run from them again,” Little added. “On our initial investigation we learned that the subject had allegedly taken some LSD in a parking lot before a concert.”
Little said officers were waiting on the results of an autopsy that was performed Monday morning which will include toxicology reports.
Edwards said that Goode had asthma but "it was controlled" through his use of an inhaler. "If it played a part [in his death], we don’t know," the lawyer added.
