S12, Chapter 3: The Randy Cox Thing

0:00 Thank you to our executive producers Sundan, Jessica Wagner, and Kay and Alison Barklay. Before this episode begins, I want to let you know I put out a short notice about the gambling ads that have been appearing on the show. To sum up the situation. I can't take them down without turning off all programmatic ads. And programmatic ads are how I keep the show going. But if the gambling ads are a genuine threat to your recovery, shoot me an email at Tapes from the Darkseide Pod at gmail dot com and I'll provide you with the episodes ad free. If you want more information about the situation, you can go back and listen to the episode titled A Note about the Gambling Ads. Thank you for your continued support.

0:50 Now let's get to the show. It's getting dot outside. In New Haven. It's a little past eight in the evening. There's still another hour of daylight. There's a block party on Lilac Street and a man named Randy Cox is in handcuffs. He's thirty six years old. The police drive him to a substation and move him into a transport van. No seatbelt because these vans don't have them, just the cold, hard metal of the bench. It's a short ride to the station. The doors shut and the van pulls out.

1:32 There's a camera inside that van, and I've watched every second of the footage it captured. The van's moving thirty six miles an hour. The officer driving has his phone in his hand. A car up ahead runs a stop sign. He has a split second to react and he hits the brakes hard. That's the sound of a man's neck breaking. Tapes from the Dark Side contains descriptions of violence and sexuality. Listener discretion is advised.

2:22 Back in episode one, we heard an interview with Carl Jacobsen and he dropped this line about Randy Cox. And you know, we're all human and we make mistakes. And I'm not looking to fire people, but I'm telling you the since the Randy Cox thing, in the incident that you're talking about, you have to treat the community with respect and dignity. That's what it comes down to. If the officers. Lilac Street, Newallville a little neighborhood in New Haven. It's mostly affordable housing with some historic homes. More police calls than most blocks get, but tonight is a night for celebration. The bloc party has music, people in the street on their porches, the kind of night where kids stay up past their bedtime, warm but not hot, low seventies, perfect weather. Juneteenth, the day America celebrates the official end of slavery. Randy Cox is there. The neighbors will tell reporters. He's the guy who makes little nights like this happen on this street.

3:29 At eight two pm, a man calls nine to one one and says someone just threatened his wife with a gun. He gives a description, please stop Randy Cox. A few minutes later, because he matches it, they search him and they find he's carrying a Ruger nine millimeter loaded ten rounds. Bunny, Hey, I talked to you. I talked to you for a second. What's what I'm gonna cover my mind?

4:12 We're doing his detaining the second. Effect n. Randy Cox is a convicted felon. That's a fact. He isn't allowed near a gun, let alone carrying it through a block party. So the charges begin to stack up. Threatening in the first degree, threatening in the second criminal, possession of a firearm, carrying without a permit, breach of piece, the cuffs go on in the back of the cruiser. On the short ride to the substation. Randy is not calm and he's not polite. The body cam catches him working the officer in the front seat little dick, pussy keep like the little girl you is, and he calls him a faggot, and then he says, quote, shoot you next month. Yes, he tells a cop he's gonna shoot him months later. Every charge against Randy Cox gets dropped.

5:16 But dropped is not the same word as innocent. The man the neighbors describe who makes the block parties happen, the man described in the nine to one one call with a loaded gun and a felony record. It's the same man. On the same night, at the substation, the police transfer Randy to a van number one seven to one. There are no seat belts back there, but there are belt loops bolted inside, something for a passenger to hold. Nobody tells Randy they exist, and it might not have mattered anyways, because his hands were cuffed behind his back. At eight thirty four pm, the doors shut the officer driving as oscar das. Randy doesn't sit up. He lays himself down on the floor and kicks the walls up front.

6:18 Diaz has his phone out scrolling, texting someone. At a red light, he takes a picture of Randy's paperwork and sends it. At one point, he's steering with his left hand so his right hand can keep the phone. The light turns green, and in the back, Randy picks himself up off the floor and sits back on the bench. The right thing to do at what turned out to be exactly at the wrong moment. At eight thirty six, a car runs the stop sign at Division and Mansfield. Diaz is doing thirty six and he stomps on the brakes.

7:00 Ho huh. The breake throws Randy down the bench, neck first into the steel partition, hands cuffed behind him, nothing between the bone and the metal. The van doesn't stop. Diaz keeps driving, and Randy starts calling. Out huh huh, huh, huh oh. No ho ho ho. H o o hoo.

7:48 Oh, Yes, I can't, officer Diaz then says, you're gonna have to wait. I can't open the door without another officer here. The camera in the back can see Randy laid out on the floor on his right side, his left leg folded up against his chest somewhere past Satrum Street. Diaz offers to call Randy an ambulance for when they get there. No listen, O my nest the man. I mean, please see Lee. I can't really, I don't wanna die like this.

8:43 The investigators did the math themselves and they put it in the report. From the first time Randy called out for help to the moment the van actually pulled over was three minutes and thirty one seconds about a mile of road. Three and a half minutes doesn't sound like much, about the time it takes to pop a bag of popcorn, But on the floor of a metal box with her neck broken, it's a different story. Diaz pulls over in front of five hundred College Street. He opens the right rear door, sees Randy on the floor, and he tells him he can't move him. He gets on the radio eight forty one pm and he asks dispatch to start an ambulance to the detention center, not to College Street, not to the man on the floor in front of him.

9:38 He asks the ambulance to meet them at the station. It's a formality more than anything else. He closes the door, turns on the overhead lights and drives the rest of the way with Randy screaming behind him. At eight forty five pm, the van pulls into the sally Port, the enclosed garage where the van it's unload. The detention supervisor that night is Sergeant Betsy Segui. Diaz walks up to her. Somebody crossed me over. I stomped on the brakes. He said, he fell inside the. Van right over. Any Well, on the way here, somebody pulls me over. It's like stopping the brakes.

10:18 And I don't know if he shouldn't fell inside of the van. And he said, you know, I opened the door. I stop and he said he can't move. Then Diaz says this out loud, unprompted to a sergeant, Well. If he really he really fell when I moving this is it? Just? Please? If he really fell, I would not even move him. That's the right answer. It's a word for word what you do with the suspected spinal injury. But there's that word, if if he really fell, the correct pro to call, followed by the doubt that ultimately buried it. Officer Louise Rivera climbs in towards Randy and then calls over his shoulder sixteen radio code for drunk, and the sergeant answers, oh, absolutely, I.

11:17 Think what yep, I'm strain it out a little bit. I mean. Sure, yep. Is this step don What if we take the cough? I mean we're here, can you argue? They decide to take the handcuffs off of Randy. Seems like a move in the right direction. Please, we're gonna get you out. Oh it was. I don't want to die like this. Uh.

11:59 For the a second time that night, Randy says, I don't want to die like this, and then Officer Joscelyn Lavender climbs in the van and tries, through sheer force of will, to make a paralyzed man walk st. What's your you don't have cuts anymore? Take him out from behind your back? There we go. Now, move let down, take that left, move it down.

12:42 Like just like to too much? Because can you're all on your right, the right side of your albody? Listen, roll to your right side. Can look my hand over there, movie leg. You're not even trying listen, look turn your body. No, I'm trying to turn your body because you're not even trying.

13:25 You're not even trying. Here we go. Come on and we're gonna. Pull you out. Mh. We'll be right back with the show. But right now, instead of our usual ad break, I want to tell you a little bit about our Patreon. It's where we have bonus episodes. We have all of our episodes ad free in wave format that's completely uncompressed, lossless audio, truly the way a Dark Side fan listens to the show.

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15:11 I guess it's not free. You basically paid for it. And the higher tiers have some free merch with them, and like, for example, a producer tier, you get your name read at the beginning of a show. So anyways, all that is at patreon dot com slash tapes from the Dark Side. Let's get back to the episode. The spinal cord is a delicate bundle of nerves running down the backbone that carries signals between the brain and the body. If the spine is unstable, moving or dragging a person can shift the bones and cause the spinal cord to be pinched, stretched, torn, potentially turning a partial or temporary injury into permanent paralysis. Dragging by the arms or legs is especially problematic because it twists and bends the neck and back. Standard medical guidance is to keep the person as still as possible and not move them unless they're in immediate danger.

16:23 Look, if you're gonna drive me and George bub home. The fuck would I lie for a question that goes unanswered. And then the next part of the video is probably the hardest to watch. The cops drag Randy by his feet all the way down the length of the van. Four hands and rubber gloves on him, on his jacket, pulling him, turning him, twisting him. The moment they pull him out of the van, they loosen their grip on him, as if they expect him to stand on his own at this point, to give up the act. But there is no act. Randy is paralyzed, and every move they make is risking the possibility that this paralyzation becomes permanent.

17:23 There, how are you making that. You just drink too much? You drink too much? Okay? They roll a wheelchair towards Randy. Then they grab him by his arms, pull him up, slam him down into the chair, angrily, resentfully. Randy is no longer a man.

18:03 He's a rag doll. I can't feel ship. Oh my god. Yes. Inside the station, the horror continues. They process him, intake, they search him in the chair, shoes off, belt off. Somewhere in the middle of it, the sergeant's phone rings. Another sarge ass if she can spare a body for the street. She says yes, and the machine keeps moving. They take off Randy's earrings. His head is tilted over onto his left shoulder, so sergeant takes Randy's head in her hands and moves it back to center. She moves the head on the neck. He tells them is broken.

19:00 Nick hurt, I say, he's sitting backward. If something hurts, sit up right. That's Officer Joscelyn Lavender again. At some point, her glove is wet with something. She wipes it clean on the back of Randy's shirt. Instead of wheeling Randy to his cell in his wheelchair, they decide he's going to walk there. They grab him by his jacket, one officer on each side, and pull him up, trying to force him to stand. Oh my god, fucking broke my Nether.

19:51 Lavender slaps her leg, lets out a long sigh. They pause for a moment. Randy is slumped down in the space in front of his wheelchair, spilling out of it. They decide they're going to try again. They grab his sweatshirt and try to force him to stand again. The shirt starts to pull up and go over his face. I can't read, Sorry about it. The cops said, we don't want you to do anything. Don't worry about it. They throw Randy to the ground. Then one officer drags him by his left arm the twenty or so feet across the floor to his cell.

20:36 His hands are still cuffed in front of him. He's motionless. Hey. During the whole exchange, there's a strange moment Lavender actually seems to be hallucinating or seeing things. He's perfectly. She looks at Randy and says, he blew me a kiss. She thinks that Randy is mocking her. See he's perfectly fine.

21:19 And then they kneel down and put the leg shackles on him. Hold on, hold on. I wish I could tell you that this was the end of the suffering that Randy would endure that night. And I'm not going to draw this out longer than it already needs to be, But I want to get down to that word suffering. Obviously, it's on comfortable to be dragged across the floor. But did Randy Cox feel pain?

22:06 If you're like me, then maybe you incorrectly believe that being paralyzed means that you don't feel pain. Paralysis and numbness are two separate systems. Movement runs down one set of pathways and sensation up another, So paralyzed doesn't mean you can't feel. A lot of people who can't move a limb still feel it, sometimes with amplified or distorted pain. Whether it actually hurts comes down to where the damage is and what specifically got cut. There's a lot that happened to Randy, from the moment that he broke his neck to the moment that he landed in that jail cell and his legs were shackled. But there are two key moments I want to hone in on, the dragging by the feet out of the van and also the dragging by his arm into the jail cell. Whether or not he felt during these moments is decided by whether sensory signals from the legs can climb past the injury to reach the brain. Now, if it was a complete cord lesion up in the neck, those signals are severed and the legs and feet genuinely register nothing. Even if the tissue gets scraped or the joints get wrenched, the body would be damaged, but the brain would never hear about it. But if the injury was incomplete, which in the video, Randy could slightly move his fingers, and it's part of what gave the officers the misperception that he

23:37 was faking it. But the thing is that implies that the motor signal is still crossing somewhere. That means that sensation is partially preserved and unpredictable. It's going to be patchy. Some spots feel and some don't. What comes through can sometimes be described as a distorted burning rather than a clean, normal touch. And let's say it actually was a clean break, absolutely no sensation in the legs. Dragging the body creates traction that transmits up the spine to the injury site and above, where sensation is fully intact. And we know that Randy could still speak, move his eyes at least to a certain extent. That upward pull at an unstable sight can be agony. The second moment I want to discuss is when Randy is in the wheelchair and they are removing his earrings. They roll his head back and forth and he cries out in agony. This is not acting even if his legs were paralyzed. The face and scalp are wired by the cranial nerves, mainly the tragemonal which branch off the brain stem above essentially any spinal injury, so head and face sensation is basically always preserved in a spinal level injury. On top of that, if the neck itself is the injury site, that tissue is dense

25:09 with pain fibers. Forcibly, rolling an injured neck grinds torn ligaments, muscle and bone against each other, the sensation would be sharp and severe. Stabbing at the neck often layered with electric shooting sensations firing down the body when the cord gets jostled. Oh my god. Some have said it's like a lightning bolt down the spine. It's near the top of what a body can produce for pain, and it would also risk finishing the job, converting an incomplete injury to complete, or even shutting down on breathing. So what we saw with Randy Cox, the slight finger movement, the slurred speech otherwise paralyzed. This points to something affecting the brain stem or the muscles of speech, not a clean midneck spinal cut. What we're likely looking at is either a very high injury or a brain stem component that's exactly the profile where sensation is preserved above the lesion and scrambled but present below. And this is the actual reason paramedics are trained to never move someone with a suspected neck injury. At precisely nine to nine pm, Officer Ronald Presley's body camera comes on. It's

26:44 the first and only recording it makes all night three minutes and twenty three seconds. You can actually see the moment he realizes his body cam is off in the other video we've been listening to. He looks down at the camera and kind of does a so prize look, hits the button and starts recording. I'm not gonna play that whole video for you, but there are a couple of moments I do want to go over. When the ambulance arrives, they come to lift Randy out to the stretcher and from the floor off camera, you can hear Cox say I can't move, and then Presley says, why do you keep winking your eye at me? For you a funny man, He's telling a paralyzed man to stop winking at him. Now, we don't know what Randy's face was doing on the floor that cell, but Presley reads it as a bit just two guys goofing around, and then Randy Cox says this no cuz I don't want to argue. I'm trying to tell you something. I need somebody to take me seriously. They finally do get Randy loaded onto a stretcher. The EMTs strap him down, and as they're buckling him in the booking officer Roberto or Tease no camera on him, walks past and says, you gotta be kidding me, and then on his way out of the room, loud enough for someone else's camera to catch it. Man the fuck up. Months later, investigators asked

28:15 or Tease about that. He told them he figured Cox was acting a hurt to get a hospital bed instead of a cell. Said that's common, and Detention said he thought that's all this was. And the scary thing is I believe he was telling the truth. Officer Presley's last words to Cox says he was being loaded into the ambulance. You keep messing with me, I'll see you when you come back. Randy Cox never came back four months later, still in a rehab bed, and the state dropped every charge. The tragedy is more than just the way that Randy was treated that night. It's the utter disregard for the possibility that he was telling the truth. From Randy Cock's sister Equavius, it.

29:04 Is not just about being paralyzed from the chest down, like you heard, is me. I can't eat, he can't sleep, he can't talk, he can't breathe, he can't do anything at all but cry. He cries every time we come near, and all we do is cry. Because we can't do anything. And from his other sister, LaToya, at a press conference a year after his paralyzation, I was. Shocked and it made me sick to my stomach. It could have took you know, one person to say, maybe we should leave him there because we don't know you know what would have been of the injury. We don't know what more damage y'all caused by moving him.

29:46 We'll be right back after this quick break. The seventy page report said that officers showed quote a lack of compassion and remorse for Cox while he pleaded for help. It found seven separate people failed him that night, the five who made up the news report, plus two more, the booking officer who told Randy to man the fuck up, and the street sergeant who's seen it was The officers would later argue in court filings that their actions were reasonable, that Cox's injuries were the result of his own negligence and carelessness in that he interfered with the investigation. There's a temptation here. I felt it on every word of the script. Call these guys monsters. Closed the book. Five officers were charged. Their own department investigated and found against every single one of them, the supervisors, the officers, monsters done.

30:54 But reality is messier than that. Here's what those officers knew about Randy gos Hawks that night. And every part of this is a confirmed fact. We've already reviewed it. A woman said Randy threatened her with a gun, and she picked him out that night, pointed to him, and when they searched him, he was carrying a loaded nine millimeter. And Randy Cox is a felon, so that's not a paperwork problem. That's years. On the ride in the van, he called the driver a faggot and told him I'll shoot you next month. And in the back of the van before the break, he was on the floor kicking the walls. That's the man in this story. If you can't hold both of these things the same time, then you've just written a story about Randy two, only you picked the flattering one. So here's the question, and I'm asking myself. Put the lead rope in my hand gun charge felon threatening to shoot the driver, and then the man on the floor of the van says that he can't move. Do I believe him? I want to say yes, I want to say that I give him the benefit of the doubts. But I've watched that tape in that body camp footage more times than's good for me, And even though I want to say yes, I can't. I've written people's stories before they've even opened their mouths. I've done it more than just a couple of times. It's

32:25 the cheapest thing of mine. Does the pattern holds the night ends, and nobody ever finds out you were guessing. Here's the dilemma we're in, though. We have to hold the other half, and we have to hold it very carefully, because it matters just as much, if not more, Nothing Randy Cox did that night moved a vertebrae. Being a felon carrying a gun, saying a slur, hitting the doors of a van with your feet do not warrant punishment. Of permanent paralyzation. A man can be everything that Randy Cox was on that night, and he can still be telling you the truth. How do you hear a man say I can't move decide it's a lie? Now, you know it's easy. You've got a file that says who he is. The file's been right all night long. It's the same way you hear a man say I can't breathe eleven times with a knee on his neck and decide that's a lie too. If this is a monster problem and not a human problem, then why does it keep happening over and over and over Minneapolis, that van and New Haven, the same cassette tape played on a loop.

33:48 The department has a word for what it found on every officer sustained. It means we looked, and it's true. The strongest thing an internal investigation and say about its own and I'll be honest. The first time I read it, one officer after another, it sounded like justice. They got him. Then I turned back a few pages to where a reviewing lieutenant watches the same tape I did. He calls the force reasonable, not excessive. He uses a phrase to describe a paralyzed man lying helpless on the ground passive resistance.

34:31 The man's body had stopped working, and the paperwork logged it as a refusal to cooperate. The same hand, the same machine wrote both sustained. Sounds like justice, but is it really Five of the offending officers were charged criminally misdemeanors second degree reckless endangerment and cruelty. Two officers pled guilty, and the three other officers, Oscar Diz, Joscelyn Lavender and Luis Rivera, had all charges dismissed. One of those five officers still works for New Haven Police Department, officer Oscar Diaz again Randy Cox's sister LaToya.

35:21 These charges were a slap in the face. It really was two misdemeanors. Randy Cox's lawyer, Ben Crump. When you think about it, it's not really fair. It's not really fair that they are getting a slap. On the wrists. If you had somebody driving recklessly and they caused someone to be paralyzed, they would be charged with assault with a vehicle right jack, And that's a felony problem. See little to no jail time, and Randy Cox has a life sentence.

36:16 The next part of this episode. I've gone back and forth whether to include this or cut it, and at the end of the day, I'm going with my gut instinct. I think it's worth hearing a black person's perspective on police brutality, especially when it's a perspective that challenges my own. As far as I know, Candace has not spoken about Randy Cox directly, but she has spoken about another case, a bigger case, featuring a man named George Floyd. Here's what she had to say about that. Why are we pretending that this criminal should be upheld as a citizen, as a martyr in Black America, a martyr for a fake narrative. By the way, police brutality, racially motivated police brutality is a myth.

37:12 Candice Owens makes a living being incendiary. It's not an insult, it's the job. She's a provocateur, a conservative commentator who built a career out of saying the thing that detonates the room, and she's very good at it. A black woman who became famous telling other black people that racism isn't what's holding them back. She picks fights, she picks them on purpose, and that's her brand. A few years ago, she stood in front of a room of mostly black college students and said this. I don't know why people like being oppressed. The weirdest thing I've ever heard. I love oppression. We're oppressed four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow, which, by the way, none of you guys lived through your grandparents, And it's embarrassing that you utilize you utilize their history, you utilize their history.

38:00 It's embarrassing. You're not living through anything right now. You're overly privileged Americans. It's what's going on right now over here shouting. That damn you heard at the end, there was none other than Charlie Kirk. So there it is a black woman in front of a room of black kids telling them their pain is a costume. Slavery doesn't count because they didn't personally feel the whip. You can hear it in Candace's voice, the certainty she knows what kind of people she's dealing with. You're not living through anything. She looked at four hundred years and a room full of people still carrying it and said, I don't see a wound.

38:43 You're performing. Get up. That clip is everywhere. It's the one that travels. It ripped across my feed with a caption already attached Candace Owen's exhibit A. But that appearance was more than ten seconds long. It was more than the ten minute long clip that we have to pull from same day, same room. A few minutes later, nobody. Has asked me my background. I come from the exact same background as you. Okay, so the idea wait. Thank you for proving my point. I grew up in a household that was largely dysfunctional. I grew up visiting my uncles in prison for various reasons. My parents are not together, they are divorce, and every single one of my mom's brothers and sisters, she's one of nine, has served some time in prison. So that was my normal growing up.

39:33 And when I got out of high school, I had this idea that because I was black, I must be a Democrat because anything else is oppression. Anything else, as people that are our white supremacists are racist or sex is the same thing that you're seeing happening in the news every single day. That part doesn't get shared, it doesn't fit the narrative. I can relate a little bit to Candice here. I grew up in a household of Democrats. I felt a certain kind of pressure as I got older to buy into those same ideals, and I pushed back on things as I got older. And although I landed back on the left side of the political aisle myself, I hold a respect for anyone who's willing to question their beliefs, no matter how uncomfortable.

40:18 That is. The first time the Candace Owen's clip crossed my feed, the four hundred Years of Slavery clip, I did exactly what it was built to make me do. I decided I knew this woman. I closed the file, I scrolled on, satisfied, and every time her face popped up in my feed from then on, I just missed her. It took this story to send me back for the rest of that clip. When I first heard Candace talk about her childhood, I did have a instinct to wonder if she's making it up. All eight siblings on her mother's side in prison. That's a lot. It's the kind of past that's almost two on the knows, So I looked into it. Candice Owens born White Plains, New York, nineteen eighty nine, raised in Stamford, Connecticut, mostly by her mother and her grandparents. When her parents split third of four kids, the grandfather did a lot of the raising. The house was, by most accounts, low income, a family that was stretching every dollar, that much the record supports. But every one of her uncles on her mom's side locked up behind bars at some point that I couldn't find, not in a profile or a bio or anywhere. It doesn't mean it's not true. Reporters write about who raised you, not about your mother's brothers and sisters.

41:47 A family detail like that could be completely true and just never make the page. Or she's doing the thing people do in front of a crowd, with your blood up, with the past a little distorted. There's a version of this where I lean in and say, she's not making it up. I checked it's all true. That would feel good, it would land, and I can't say it. But here's what's not in question. Divorced parents, raised by her grandparents, a family stretching every dollar. And then I found this. When Candice Owens was seventeen years old, a car full of boys left her a string of voicemails. These were not just harmless prank phone calls. They were racist threats, the kind of thing that keeps a kid from going to school the next day. And one of those kids was the son of the mayor and a man who would go on to become governor of Connecticut. Maybe that's why it took the police six weeks before anyone filed a charge. Six weeks when you're seventeen isn't six weeks.

42:51 It's a month that at that age feels like a year. You spent a couple of days home from school, and then you return walking the halls, knowing who did it and watching nothing happen. Candice and her family reported it. The system took its time, and she's always believed that the time it took had something to do with whose son it was. Her family decided to go to the NAACP. They sued the school district for failing to protect their daughter. They won, and a boy did get arrested. So the woman standing in front of those kids telling them they're not living through anything at seventeen had lived through the things she's telling them to get over. The slurs on the voicemail, the school that let six weeks go by, the institution that was supposed to protect her, looking the other way until the family made them look she survived.

43:48 The exact thing she now says isn't real. I don't say that to dunk on her. I say that because it's the saddest possible version of this. Whatever happened to that seventeen year old, she built something on top of it that lets her look at a room full of kids carrying the same wound and call it a costume. The girl who needed someone to witness what was done to her grew up into a woman who won't witness it in anyone else. I keep doing the same thing. We keep doing it to her, to the cops in the van, to each other. We take the worst ninety seconds we've got of a person, and we decide that's the whole story. In the back of the van, on the floor, Randy Cox felt exactly what it's like to be a story somebody already finished writing. When we come back.

44:50 What he said when it was finally his turn to talk, We'll be right back after a quick break. Don't go any where. Randy Cox came out of the other side of the worst moment of his life pointing the other way. Cox's sister, reading a note directly from Randy. He said, I know it's only an arrest, but it's a start. It's time for a change. This ain't about me, It's about the people that come after me, so no one else has. To go through this again. That was Randy's sister at the mic speaking the words that he conveyed, because that's how Randy talks to the world now, and what he wanted the world to hear wasn't about him. It was about the next person. Resentment would make sense, resentments would be earned, God would it ever. But resentment is a fist.

45:51 What came out of Randy was the opposite, an open hand he pointed away from himself towards the next person in the back of the next van. Paralyzed is a clinical word, a number on somebody's chart, but here's what it actually sounds like in real life. He has to ring a corbell to ask for a sip of water. The cup is sitting right next to him, but he can't. Pick it up. Every drink of water, bite of food, every itch you can't scratch, not to mention every time he needs to be turned in the night so his skin doesn't break down.

46:32 The man who was injured because nobody stopped to look. Now literally needs someone to look every hour of every day for the rest of his life. His mother was there for it, all of it, the hospital and the surgeries and the long nights. Her name is Dorian Coleman. His mom visits him daily too, even if she has to just sit there and watch him hospital dead. He needs somebody to help him get something to drink. He needs somebody to help him get some food to eat. I couldn't find the audio of it, but in that same interview, Doreen also said that she catches the city bus from one side of town to the other. The ride takes about an hour each way. She does this every day. Her one regret about all the time she spends watching after her son quote, I'm just upset a little bit that I can't stay there overnight just to help him through the night. Three weeks after that night, a new police chief would take over the New Haven Police Department. He walks into the entire mess the video.

47:47 The whole city has now seen one hundred million dollar lawsuit. A department that just paralyzed a man, a city that does not at this moment trusts the people who are supposed to protect acted. And the first thing that Carl Jacobson does is the thing that nobody in that van did. He looks. I've watched a video over and over again, and you know why, because I don't want to forget it. That's my job as the chief, but not forget what happened to mister Cox and make sure it never happens again. And I'm committed, you know, I know sometimes my passion is too much and I uh and and and this is hard. It's not an easy job. But I am committed to the to the men and women of the New Having Police Department, the men and women of the community, to right these wrongs and turn this, turn this around.

48:40 Carl forced himself to watch the worst thing his department ever did on a loop on purpose because he believed forgetting would be the real failure. That the way you dishonor a wound is to look away from it. Carl Jacobson met with Randy in the hospital. He said it moved him and then he followed through. He used this tragedy to rewrite the playbook. What Karl came to build in New Haven has a name. They call it Medical Miranda. Now, if you have somebody in custody and they tell you something's wrong, you have to ask if they need help.

49:23 You're not allowed to decide on your own if they're faking it. And that's law. Now. What Karl heard, or perhaps didn't hear in the van that night, he took that, and he legislated against it, and he didn't stop there duty to intervene. If you see another officer crossing the line, you don't get to stand there. You're required to step in. A bystander doesn't get to stay. A bystander also seat belts in the van's medical training an entire architecture of essentially empathy, a system that would now force people to ask you if you're okay. And the man who built it himself wasn't.

50:12 He hadn't been okay for a long time. And it wasn't something anyone could see. It lived on his phone, it lived in the quiet after his shift, and by the time anyone thought to ask the question that he had made mandatory for everyone else, it was too late. If you, or someone you know is struggling with gambling, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is available twenty four to seven eight hundred five two two four, seven, zero zero, free and confidential. I want to thank all of our Patreon members. Thank you to our executive producers Greg b Sun Dean and Kay, Alison Barkley and Jessica Wagner. Thank you to our associate producers Meg Veronica, Dave McManus, Lindsay Troy and Taylor Cox. Our seven dollar members Carter, Nicky Bell, and Jeff Gordon. Our six dollar member a tie in.

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54:09 Your call has been forwarded to voicemail. The person you're trying to reach is not available at the tone. Please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up. You are not a loser, even if your mind tells you that you're not a failure. You're not a bad person. Yeah, I'm not just saying that. You've done a lot of things in your life that so many people have any been tried to do. It takes a lot of courage. It's not easy. Well, quitting isn't an option. You can't quit, can't quit on yourself.

54:59 There's too many people I love you, your family, people in AA, your friends. If I can make any suggestions. If you don't feel like calling a sponsor, you don't have. To call them. Hum just get on a meeting online you can and just say where you're at. Just be anonymous, say where you're at. You don't deserve your face. Just get it out there. Text somebody, m