When protesters marching Tuesday in honor of the late Yale assistant professor Samuel See reached Linsly-Chittenden Hall on Substantial Street, they paused to search up at the windows of the English division constructing.
“That’s the window of Sam’s workplace,” Hannah Zeavin ’12 stated, pointing to the third floor. “This is in which Sam taught.”
Amid chants of “Justice for Sam See!” and “Police Accountability,” roughly forty protesters wound their way from New Haven City Hall to the headquarters of the New Haven Police Division, blocking oncoming targeted traffic as they reduce by way of the heart of the Yale campus. Protesters called for an independent investigation into the circumstances of See’s arrest and incarceration and an finish to the alleged police brutality that they mentioned contributed to his death.
See was detained on Nov. 23 at police headquarters — in the lock-up center administered by state judicial marshals — following a domestic dispute that afternoon with his husband, Sunder Ganglani. Though the males had protective orders against every other, Ganglani had returned to See’s Wooster Square home to retrieve some belongings.
See’s sister, Kelly Flanagan, named in the police right after understanding of the encounter from out of state. See, who allegedly struggled with the arresting officers, sustained a lower over his left eye and was taken care of for the damage at Yale-New Haven Hospital ahead of becoming detained at 1 Union Avenue. State marshals found him dead in his cell the following morning, at approximately 6 a.m. on Nov. 24.
“I referred to as the police for assist for my brother that day, and he’s dead,” See’s sister, Kelly Flanagan, informed protesters gathered in front of police headquarters. “I do not want this to ever come about to another individual once more.”
Flanagan was joined by her brother’s buddies, colleagues and students from the two coasts of the country, in addition to a number of city activists who situated See’s death within what they described as pattern of police brutality. The protest was organized by Nathan Brown, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Brown and See were Ph.D college students together at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“It seems [See] was treated in a quite inhumane vogue,” explained Yale English Professor Jill Campbell, a single of a handful of Yale faculty members who participated in the demonstration, along with a amount of graduate college students and undergraduates. “I don’t know the trigger of his death, but the circumstances surrounding his death propose that in his struggles, he was treated with inhumanity.”
However See was on leave this semester from the English division, Campbell mentioned she had stayed in touch with her colleague more than e-mail and that she knew him to be getting health issues. He had been hospitalized a number of occasions over the course of the fall, she additional.
Campbell explained she hoped the protest would place strain on the city and on the police department to perform a “truly independent investigation” into the circumstances of See’s death.
Questioning the truthfulness of NHPD reports that See “fell” even though currently being arrested, Brown stated the cut above See’s left eye indicates that he was taken care of violently by police in his own residence. He said the distinct tragedy of See’s death is inseparable from its social meaning, calling for the development of far better means of dealing with men and women struggling with psychological health concerns. Having threatened to kill arresting officers, See was charged with threatening in the 2nd degree, interfering with police and violating a protective purchase, in accordance to the preliminary police report.
“We can’t feel a word the police say,” Brown explained, including, “Sam was in a fragile state, and he was thrown in jail and left to die. We want to insist that that’s not acceptable.”
Brown likened the situation to reports of negligence in the same state-administered lock-up center in 2012, when a 44-yr-old woman died after her pleas for assist have been ignored by state marshals, according to a witness in the jail.
Campbell stated See held deep political convictions, and that he would have desired a political response to the terms of his death.
“He wouldn’t want any person to consider his death was significant only simply because he was a Yale professor,” she mentioned. “He would want it to be seen as a component of the inhumanity with which other struggling men and women are treated.”
John Deal with, professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, mentioned any death in police custody raises questions of accountability. He added that he wished University administrators had reckoned more significantly with See’s death — possibly by expressing deeper grief and condolences. Christopher Miller ’83, professor of French and African-American research, leveled a equivalent criticism in a Sunday e-mail to the News, calling the University’s silence “deafening.”
Yale Spokesman Tom Conroy declined to comment on the protest, as did NHPD Spokesman David Hartman, each reached Tuesday. Conroy stated the University was “deeply saddened by Sam See’s tragic and untimely death” and hopes the investigations — the two into his trigger of death and the conditions of his incarceration — are concluded shortly.
The state Judicial Branch is nevertheless reviewing its internal policies and procedures to make sure there was no wrongdoing on the element of its marshals, Judicial Branch Spokesperson Rhonda Stearley-Hebert stated Tuesday. She declined to comment on the protesters’ phone for an independent investigation until the state’s inner probe is full.
The chief state healthcare examiner’s office has ruled out trauma from the cut to See’s head as his cause of death. A full autopsy report will not be launched till the outcomes of a toxicology examination are obtained.
Protesters call for police accountability
