The mother of Irvo Otieno on Monday renewed her call for justice for her son, who died while in custody at Central State Hospital in March 2023.
A Dinwiddie County jury this month acquitted former hospital employee Wavie Jones, one of three defendants in the trial. In footage from the hospital, Jones is seen restraining Otieno, who was in shackles and handcuffs, while leaning over his upper body. Jones was charged with second-degree murder, but had those downgraded to involuntary manslaughter in May.
Caroline Ouko, Mark Krudys, and Monica Hutchinson pose with a banner outside the federal courthouse in Richmond on Monday. Ouko is the mother of Irvo Otieno, who died while in custody at Central State Hospital in March 2023.
Luca Powell
On Monday, Otieno’s mother Caroline Ouko held a press conference outside Richmond’s federal courthouse and called the prosecution in Jones case weak. She said she was retraumatized as defense attorneys painted a “racist narrative” about her son.
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“The defense was permitted to portray my son as a dangerous, aggressive Black man who needed to be restrained. He was paraded by the defense like an animal in a cage,” Ouko said. “That feels then and now like a racist narrative.”
Lawyer Mark Krudys, who is representing Ouko, listed what the family says are failures on the part of Dinwiddie County Commonwealth’s attorney Amanda Mann.
Chief among those was Mann’s failure to develop Otieno’s character, but also a sense of unpreparedness and a lack of “vigor,” he said. Krudys said that was apparent when Mann allowed her junior attorneys to handle closing arguments and important cross-examinations.
Otieno
“She should have been the face of this thing,” Krudys said.
He also said Mann missed a window to object to the racial composition of the jury, and critiqued the ease with which Jones’ defense attorneys struck jurors who had sympathy for mental illness or who had tangential connections to the group “Black Lives Matter.”
‘The time for the DOJ to get involved was 18 months ago’
Otieno, 28, lived for 10 years with severe mental illness, Ouko said. She said he was previously able to manage his episodes, with long years of remission in between, she said.
The critiques came with another call for the U.S. Department of Justice to try Otieno’s case under federal civil rights law, which has been done in other prominent law enforcement death cases, including the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.
Mann
The family sent a third letter to the office of U.S. attorney Jessica Aber, who has previously resisted commenting beyond saying that her office was monitoring the case. Ouko and Krudys also sent letters when the former Dinwiddie County Commonwealth’s attorney announced she was leaving the office and when charges were dropped against five other defendants seen on video restraining Otieno.
Aber’s office did not return a request for comment on Monday morning. The Dinwiddie County Commonwealth’s attorney‘s Office also did not return calls seeking comment.
The gun was equipped a weapon-mounted laser, extended magazine and a machine gun conversion device that made it capable of automatic gunfire, authorities said.
“The time for the DOJ to get involved was 18 months ago,” said Krudys, a former federal prosecutor. “In the past, there’s been a recognition that local district attorneys just don’t have the know-how to get these cases done.”
Ten Henrico County sheriff’s deputies and hospital workers were initially charged in the case. Video surveillance from inside the hospital shows Otieno being pressed to the floor for about 11 minutes by employees and law enforcement.
Defense lawyers for those charged have said they were trying to restrain him.
Jury deliberated for 20 minutes
Last month’s trial lasted four days, concluding with jurors taking just 20 minutes to deliberate. They ultimately acquitted Jones.
Much of the trial centered around testimony of Dr. Jennifer Bowers, the Richmond medical examiner who first announced Otieno’s cause of death to be asphyxia. Asphyxia is an umbrella term for a lack of oxygen.
Defense attorneys accused Bowers of “reverse-engineering” her cause of death finding. They then proceeded to put on their own experts, including a cardiologist, a pulmonologist and their own forensic pathologist.
In closing arguments, defense attorney Doug Ramseur stated that Otieno’s heart was a “ticking time bomb.”
“And that bomb went off at Central State Hospital,” Ramseur said.
Krudys called that argument “an absurd notion” that might have been rebutted had prosecutors called their own cardiologist at Jones’ trial.
Monica Hutchinson, president of the Henrico County Branch of the NAACP, called the defense strategy a distraction from the circumstances of Otieno’s death at Central State.
Hutchinson said anyone with high blood pressure should be “very afraid” at the license it gives law enforcement to mistreat Black men.
“That just sounds like an excuse to give an out to law enforcement should they kill another Black man,” Hutchinson said. “None of us should accept that. If any of you has those underlying health conditions, you should be afraid, you should be very afraid, because what the defense is saying is that having those underlying health conditions means that if (law enforcement) kill you, they’re gonna blame that.”
A judge in September approved an $8.5 million out-of-court wrongful death settlement reached between Otieno’s family, the state, Henrico County and the county sheriff.
Irvo Otieno died March 6 at Central State Hospital. Seven Henrico County deputies and three hospital workers have been charged with second-deg…
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