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What happened Monday night on a Detroit street during a traffic stop by police is still unclear, but a father has lost his son and he still doesn’t have any answers as to how he died.
Anthony Clark, 24, was pulled over by police for having tinted windows on his Dodge Charger, which is a violation of state law, and reportedly driving erratically, according to the Detroit News.
How Clark went from a routine traffic stop to dying is what his father, Pastor Kevin Clark, is trying to piece together. According to Kevin Clark, who spoke with the Detroit News, no one from the city’s Police Department was at the hospital when he arrived to find that his son had passed away.
“I got to the hospital Monday night, and there was nobody there from the Detroit police to tell me what happened,” Clark told the newspaper. “I had to wait until the next morning to get any information. It’s ridiculous.”
Clark believes that his son, who was asthmatic, may have been struggling to breathe, which is why he would have been driving erratically.
“We’ve had to put him on [breathing] machines, and he couldn’t play sports because of his condition,” Clark told the Detroit News. Clark added that his son was probably “grasping for air or reaching for his inhaler, which is why they said he was weaving.”
Clark told the newspaper that a lieutenant finally called him the next morning to read off an officer’s account of what happened.
“The officer said after he cuffed my son, he told him, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and that they gave him his [inhaler],” Clark said. “He told them, ‘It’s not working; call EMS.’ Then my son dies right there.”
“Understandably, the father is very upset; he’s just lost his son,” Detroit police spokeswoman June West said in a statement viewed by the Detroit News. “Unfortunately, we were unable to talk with him at the hospital Monday night. However, we did speak with him Tuesday morning.
“We provided him with answers as best we could at this stage of the investigation, and we will be reaching out to the family in the next few days to provide them with updated information as it becomes available.”
Clark told the newspaper that he has hired an attorney, who is trying to obtain dash-cam video of the incident, which may help explain what happened that night.
“There was nobody there,” Clark told the Detroit News, referring to the hospital where his son was brought. “The hospital chaplain was the only person who could tell me anything, and he said the EMTs told him my son had died of a heart attack. I tried calling police, and someone got on the phone and told me nobody was there to help me.”
Read more at the Detroit News.