Albuquerque Tribune Online: News
Police Chief Jerry Galvin said all allegations will be investigated in the man's death.
By Frank Zoretich and Tim Archuleta
Tribune reporter
A friend of Kevin Eugene Boyer who watched him die handcuffed and leg-shackled on a city street said Boyer had screamed for more than an hour that he was having breathing problems but that the police did nothing to help him until after he'd stopped breathing.
Juan "Papas" Javier, who lives in one of the apartment units near where the death occurred, said Boyer suffered from asthma and had been known to use an inhaler to relieve the symptoms.
The 25-year-old Boyer, a recent prison parolee with a drug record, died Thursday after a foot chase with police in Albuquerque's University Area.
An autopsy is planned to determine the cause of his death.
"He was lying in the gutter with his head on the curb, gasping and screaming that he couldn't breathe," Javier said.
"'Papas, help me!' he screamed, but when I headed out the gate, three policemen stopped me. They said, 'We know him. He's faking.'
Javier said police didn't help Boyer "until he turned over on his back and was looking at the sky. Then they took the handcuffs off him and started CPR. But I saw that his eyes were locked open. 'No use in that,' I said. 'He's dead.'"
Police have not released any documents in the case, with Albuquerque Police Chief Jerry Galvin saying the incident is still under investigation.
Galvin said he was aware of reports that some eyewitnesses had said Boyer was asking for help.
"I've heard people were saying that he was asking for help," Galvin said.
He said allegations that Boyer's friend was not allowed to help him and that officers said the man was "faking it" were new to him.
"Each one of the allegations will be investigated," Galvin said. "People need to come forward. We'll investigate each and every one to see if they are true or not true. I know the young man dying is traumatic."
Galvin was at the scene of the incident when officers arrested Boyer after a brief foot chase that ended in a nearby restaurant.
He said he was not with the officers when they returned Boyer to the scene where the chase had begun, by a parked pickup truck, and where Boyer died.
"I know for a fact that he wasn't beaten," Galvin said. "I talked to him. I touched him. I was shocked to hear an hour later that he was dead."
Galvin said that department policy requires officers to investigate a prisoner's health condition if the prisoner complains.
He said officers are trained to check to see if there is something interfering with a prisoner's ability to breathe.
Galvin said it's important for the investigation to be completed before any conclusions of wrongdoing are drawn.
"I would hope that people would withhold judgment until all the facts are in," he said. "It's not fair to pre-judge it."
But Boyer's girlfriend said police were cruel.
"He'd have been better off if they'd shot him in the head rather than letting him die like that in the street," said Alicia Dissette, Boyer's 20-year-old girlfriend of two months.
According to the Albuquerque Police Department account, the incident began shortly before 5 p.m. Thursday after officers approached a pickup truck and Boyer fled.
Boyer ran south through the Smith's grocery store parking lot and down an alley to the back of Ron's Camino Real restaurant in the Southeast Heights.
Officer Leonard Halloway, who had stopped the pickup, chased Boyer and was joined in the pursuit by Officer Joseph Feather.
They followed him into the restaurant kitchen, said Detective John Walsh, a spokesman for the Police Department, and engaged in what he described as "a pretty good struggle in the kitchen" during which Mace was sprayed at Boyer.
After the arrest, the police officers called for a rescue crew to "flush" the Mace from Boyer, Walsh said, and then took him back to the pickup truck.
According to police records, Walsh said, the truck was an "embezzled" vehicle -- not stolen, exactly, but reported by its owner as having been borrowed and not returned.
Mindy Borries, the manager of the restaurant where Boyer was arrested, said no one there knew him and that he had never worked there.
Borries said she was gone from the restaurant when police arrested Boyer, but that she'd returned shortly afterward, when she was given an account of events from restaurant employees.
The kitchen has two doors at the back of the restaurant, she said. Borries said Boyer ran in through one door, ran through the kitchen and tried to exit through the other.
But he was pushing the screen door outward and it opens only inward, she said. Before he figured that out, she said, the police had grabbed him and, within minutes, handcuffed him and took him outside.
Borries said none of her employees told her they saw police strike or spray Mace at Boyer. "If they Maced him, it must have been somewhere else," she said.
Walsh, the police spokesman, said that Galvin and Capt. Gene Hallburton had assisted officers at the restaurant after Boyer was arrested but that both of them left before Boyer was returned to the location of the pickup truck.
On the street at Oxford and Yale, Walsh said, a police field investigator, Kevin Sanchez, arrived to take fingerprints and photographs.
"Shortly after Sanchez arrived, Boyer suffered a medical episode," Walsh said. "Nobody knows what caused it."
Sanchez attempted to revive Boyer with cardiopulmonary resuscitation but failed, Walsh said.
A rescue unit that arrived also failed to revive Boyer. Walsh said the rescue unit arrived "within minutes." Boyer's friends said it took at least a half-hour for the rescue unit to arrive.
"I'd given him $5 to go to McDonald's to get something to eat," Javier said. "He drove a borrowed pickup truck and when he came back the police were right behind him."
When they began to ask questions, Javier said, Boyer panicked and ran.
"He'd only been out of the pen (penitentiary) for a month-and-a-half," Javier said.
Boyer had served his prison time at Hobbs for drug trafficking, Javier and other friends who live at the apartments said.
© The Albuquerque Tribune.