Q: How did you find out about the sad case of Darryl Mefferd?

A: In 2016, in one of the most diverse cities in the United States, a Latino and Indigenous man named Darryl Dean Mefferd died in Vallejo police custody in a manner hauntingly similar to George Floyd. 

Mefferd committed no crime. Nor was he eligible for an involuntary mental health hold, according to medical staff at the hospital from which Ofc. Jeremy Callinan took him. More than eight years later, the basis for Mefferd’s detention remains unclear. 

To this day, the city of Vallejo has not publicly acknowledged the fact that Mefferd died in police custody, which went unnoticed at the time by the news media. Mefferd’s family wanted to sue the city, but several lawyers declined to take their case because official records labeled his death an accidental drug overdose.

But then a confidential source came forward. They had been reviewing a first-of-its-kind database, built by this newsroom and released to the public in 2020, detailing a generation of killings by Vallejo police. Had we heard about the killing at the Crisis Center, the source asked?

This simple question set in motion a more than year-long investigation based on medical files, interviews with family members, coroner’s reports and other public records, as well as the confidential source, who reviewed the still-unreleased body camera footage of the incident shortly after it occurred.

That original investigation would not have been possible without the Mefferd family’s trust and help. We had the difficult task of describing the true circumstances of his death to his loved ones, who learned, for the first time and through tears, that he in fact suffered as he died. With the help of a family friend, Mefferd’s elderly mother, who was in poor health, obtained Mefferd’s private medical records from two hospitals and entrusted us with them. These records proved critical to our reporting. 

We then presented the available information to three leading experts in forensic pathology who examined the facts of the case. They all said they would have likely ruled the death a homicide.

Q: Can you walk us through the information the city has released about Darryl’s death and when they released it, and also what they’re still holding back?

The city of Vallejo still refuses to disclose public records about the case despite an ongoing public records lawsuit, in which Open Vallejo prevailed last May. But by publishing our investigation, this newsroom convinced three other agencies — the California Department of Justice, Fairfield Police Department, and Solano County Sheriff’s Office — to release nearly all of the records in their possession, with relatively few redactions. Fairfield police had previously refused to disclose any records, and the sheriff’s office failed to disclose theirs until just hours before we initially planned to publish. After Open Vallejo sued the local district attorney’s office, that agency also disclosed its case file, including Callinan’s body camera footage. Last month, we published a lengthy, new investigation based on these records, which is the subject of this award.

The newly disclosed records confirmed even the finest details of our original investigation. They also revealed chilling new facts. For example, Callinan’s body camera footage shows that Mefferd’s last words were, “I can’t breathe. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I can’t breathe.” Other records show that Vallejo Police Det. Mathew Mustard asked Callinan whether he was familiar with the dangers of putting a person in prone restraint following the killing. When Callinan responded that he had received training on the topic, Mustard quickly changed the subject.

Many of these records are the very same Vallejo Police Department records that the city of Vallejo continues to withhold. In addition, our reporting found that other records remain undisclosed by any party. These records, including hospital surveillance footage of Mefferd at Sutter Solano Medical Center, may be in the sole possession of the city of Vallejo. 

We continue to pursue Vallejo’s records in litigation against the city.

Q: What are the biggest unanswered questions remaining in this investigation? 

A: The unanswered questions are several. First, why was Mefferd detained at all? Sutter Solano staff told investigators that he did not present behaviors that would make him eligible for a mental health hold. Nor was he under arrest. 

In addition, it is entirely unclear why Callinan would hold Mefferd down for more than 10 minutes, including after he became still and quiet, when law enforcement agencies have known about the potentially lethal effects of prone restraint for decades. It is also unclear why he was not terminated, especially because he was still on probation at his new job.

In addition, Sutter Solano called Vallejo police to assist a woman who was there on a mental health hold, who had taken off her clothes and wandered off into the chilly night. We do not know what happened to her.

Finally, this case and others raise disturbing questions about the extent to which the city of Vallejo has covered up other critical incidents, and the lengths to which police, city attorneys, and others will go to do so.

Q: Tell us about positional asphyxia and why it’s a risk with so-called less lethal restraint techniques?

Placing a person on their stomach restricts breathing and blood flow, especially for those who carry extra weight around their middle, said Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist and adjunct professor at George Washington University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. 

This becomes especially dangerous when someone is experiencing heightened metabolic demands on their body from the stress of a police encounter, a physical struggle with officers, or the effects of stimulant drugs, he said. 

That is because people with a high metabolic demand must breathe harder and faster to push carbon dioxide from their lungs. Weedn often explains the science using the example of running on a treadmill: such exertion involves huffing and puffing. When breathing is restricted during that state, the body may experience metabolic acidosis, or a build-up of acid that can trigger cardiac arrest, Weedn said. 

“It is natural for us to assume that when people say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ that means they’re not getting any oxygen,” Weedn said. “It’s probably the reverse — it’s probably that they can’t breathe out the CO2.” 

Weedn said many officers and paramedics are taught the “myth” that someone is breathing if they are talking. But in fact, he said, it takes very little air to move the vocal cords for speech. 

“What people are really saying is they’re in respiratory distress,” Weedn said. “Nobody goes, ‘I almost can’t breathe, I almost can’t breathe.’ That’s ridiculous to think somebody would say that. You and I would both go, ‘I can’t breathe,’ when we’re having such difficulty breathing.”

A recent investigation led by the Associated Press uncovered more than 1,000 deaths in the U.S. between 2012 and 2021 that resulted from police using tactics or weapons that are supposed to be non-lethal. At least 740 of the victims died after officers held them facedown in the prone position, often while applying body weight to keep them still. The deadly force happened in big cities and small towns across America, disproportionately impacting Black people, according to the investigation.

Mefferd’s last words echoed those of many others who died during police restraint, including the high-profile cases of George Floyd, whose murder in 2020 by Minneapolis police sparked nationwide demonstrations, and Eric Garner, who died in 2014 when a New York City police officer placed him in a chokehold. In 2019, police in Colorado placed 23-year-old Elijah McClain in a carotid hold and paramedics injected him with ketamine; two paramedics and one officer were convicted in the killing. Countless others have died in a similar way with little scrutiny or media attention.

In response to the AP investigation, the Police Executive Research Forum released guidance in September on how law enforcement can reduce restraint-related deaths. The guidelines recognize that prone restraint can be deadly and recommend that police remove a person from that position, either placing them on their side or sitting them up, “as soon as possible.”

That teaching has been widely incorporated in police training for decades, said Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and a former police officer. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice published a bulletin in 1995 with similar warnings about the risks of prone restraint. 

“Once someone is handcuffed, you don’t keep them on their stomach,” Stoughton said. “You certainly don’t put them on their stomach and hold them there — even if they are still not fully cooperative, even if they are still resisting to some extent — because of the potential for positional asphyxia.” Prone restraint can be deadly even if officers do not add their body weight by kneeling or sitting on top of a person, Stoughton said.  “Weight on the back makes it worse, but that’s not necessary to kill someone in this position,” he said. “The risk exists even without that.” 

Q: Did anything unexpected happen while you were reporting this story?

In November, the Solano County District Attorney’s Office released to this newsroom more than 40 minutes of footage from Callinan’s body-worn camera and in-car camera from the night of the incident, as well as hours of surveillance footage from the scene; more than three hours of audio recordings, including dispatch communications and interviews with Callinan, witnesses, and Mefferd’s family members; and a 577-page binder of investigative reports and autopsy records. 

The Fairfield Police Department, Solano County Sheriff’s Office, and California Department of Justice have also released records from the Mefferd case in the months since Open Vallejo first uncovered the fatal incident in an investigation published last June, in which three experts said they would have ruled the death a homicide. That story was based on the public records available at the time, interviews with family members, and a confidential source with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. 

The release of body camera footage follows a years-long push for the records by Open Vallejo, which filed a public records lawsuit in December 2023 against Solano County District Attorney Krishna Abrams, Sheriff Tom Ferrara, and the agencies they lead. 

Abrams, who ultimately reviews all fatal incidents involving law enforcement in Solano County for potential criminal charges, had only released records of five recent police shootings in response to numerous public records requests Open Vallejo had filed since 2021.  

But during the course of the public records litigation, Deputy Chief District Attorney Bruce Flynn made a startling admission: a district attorney investigator had since discovered boxes of evidence from more than a dozen police shootings and other in-custody deaths dating back to 2013. 

Flynn told lawyers representing Open Vallejo during an August 2024 deposition that Lt. Chuck Renfro stumbled across the records in a back area of the agency’s Fairfield office sometime last year. There he found 14 thick investigative binders sitting unmarked and forgotten among rows of cluttered cubicles. Inside the binders were DVDs with surveillance and body camera footage, reams of investigative reports, and other evidence from the deaths of five men killed by Vallejo police: Mefferd, Timothy Walker, Phillip Conley, Angel Ramos, and Ronell Foster. 

“Our office is filled with boxes everywhere. It looks like a hoarder’s house,” Flynn testified. “He just happened to find these, and then he took steps to make sure that they were preserved.” 

Flynn testified during the deposition that he thought his agency had returned the years-old cases to the local departments that originally handled each investigation, but “later found out that that was incorrect.”

In an email sent to Open Vallejo on March 12, District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Monica Martinez said the agency did not realize it possessed the Mefferd case records, but turned them over “as soon as it was discovered that our investigation bureau had additional reports.”

Q: Every successful investigation teaches you something you’ll carry forward to your next assignment. What did you learn from this investigation that helped you grow as a reporter?

Our newsroom could not have published the original story without the assistance of the Mefferd family. We could not have published either investigation without the help of the Protecting Journalists Pro Bono Program, including our attorneys at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and Covington & Burling LLP. 

We learned that even the most challenging stories are possible when you have the help of people who care, including the confidential source, without whom the world might never know Darryl Mefferd’s name.

Q: What was Darryl like as a person? What struggles in his life led up to his tragic demise? 

A: A proud Latino and Indigenous man, Mefferd was the family clown — large, loud, and always ready to wrap his niece in a bear hug. He was a talented cook who made his niece Courtney Mefferd seafood pasta on her birthday and dreamed of pursuing his passion for cooking with a new job at a waterfront Vallejo restaurant. He was religious and regularly prayed the rosary.

Mefferd was a heavy drinker who died seeking treatment for alcohol withdrawal. His fateful decision to seek help led directly, and tragically, to his likely preventable death at the hands of law enforcement.