TACOMA — One of the biggest unanswered questions from the night Manuel Ellis died was how his fatal encounter with police began. Tacoma police told investigators that Ellis initiated it, attacking officers, and defense attorneys for the three officers on trial for his death repeated that premise in opening statements of the historic trial.
But on Tuesday, that premise was undercut by two witnesses who provided the stiffest contradiction to date of the picture the officers and their attorneys presented.
Sara McDowell and her ex-boyfriend, Keyon Lowery, said in testimony Tuesday that they were driving in separate cars when they saw Ellis walking away from a patrol car, then saw Ellis summoned back by officers. One officer swung his car door open, dropping Ellis to the ground. Both officers were soon on top of Ellis, in a violent struggle that ended in his death.
“When I saw Manuel not doing anything and him get attacked like that, it wasn’t right,” McDowell, 26, testified. “I’d never seen police do anything like that. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It was scary. It wasn’t okay.”
McDowell recorded the scrum on her cell phone but testified that she didn’t realize until June 2020 — when Ellis’s death was ruled a homicide — what she had recorded. “I didn’t want to send this to police,” McDowell testified. “I was scared. They were the ones who did it.”
The video undercut the only public account of Ellis’s death until then, provided by the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, that indicated Ellis, a 33-year-old Black man, was aggressive toward police and that officers hadn’t choked him or placed their weight on him in a hazardous way.
McDowell’s video showed Tacoma officer Christopher “Shane” Burbank striking Ellis with fists around his head, and his partner, Matthew Collins, lifting and slamming Ellis to the ground.
On Tuesday, the fifth day of the officers’ trial, testimony from McDowell and Lowery characterized the officers as the aggressors. Both witnesses said Ellis posed no threat to the officers, the polar opposite of the situation defense attorneys had described.
Collins, 40, and Burbank, 38, are charged with second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter. Officer Timothy Rankine, 34, is charged with first-degree manslaughter. All three officers have pleaded not guilty. They are free on bail and remain employed by the Tacoma Police Department on paid leave.
The closely watched trial is the biggest prosecution of law enforcement officers in Washington for an on-duty death since the 1930s.
The Pierce County Medical Examiner ruled Ellis’s death a homicide caused by oxygen deprivation during physical restraint. Lawyers for the officers have countered that the medical examiner found enough methamphetamine in Ellis’s system to kill him.
Lowery, Tuesday’s first witness, described his reaction to what he saw police do to Ellis as “disbelief.” He was in a car following McDowell to her sister’s house, where they planned to spend the night, when they happened upon a police cruiser stopped at a red light.
Lowery and McDowell provided lockstep accounts. Both said they saw Ellis walking away from the cruiser on a sidewalk, then coming back as if someone had called him there. After he was knocked to the ground by the door, Burbank, who was in the passenger seat, got out and on top of Ellis before he had a chance to stand, while Collins left the driver’s side of the cruiser and rushed to subdue Ellis, Lowery and McDowell testified.
“He never really made it to the car,” Lowery said, testifying that Burbank was almost instantly on top of Ellis and punched him up to three times. Collins came around the car and took control of Ellis’s lower body, Lowery testified.
As Lowery left the scene, he said it appeared the officers had apprehended Ellis and were in control of him. Lowery said Ellis never acted aggressively toward the officers nor fought back, and was “no threat at all, none.”
Lowery’s and McDowell’s testimony starkly contradicted Collins’s account to investigators examining Ellis’s death. Collins told detectives that the scrum with Ellis began when Ellis grabbed him directly in front of the patrol vehicle, hoisted the officer into the air, and caused him to land on his back.
Burbank gave a different account to investigators, saying Ellis was striking a threatening posture that made him worry for Collins, so he knocked Ellis down with the vehicle door.
Lowery and McDowell, however, said the officers were in control of Ellis throughout the struggle.
As McDowell recorded the incident, she can be heard screaming, “Oh my god! Stop hitting him! Just arrest him!”
Rankine, who arrived after Burbank and Collins had restrained and hogtied Ellis, is accused of sitting atop Ellis and refusing to move even as Ellis gasped his last words, saying “I can’t breathe” for the seventh time.
After Ellis’ death was ruled a homicide in June 2020, McDowell said she read a news article about the case. McDowell checked the metadata of her video from the night Ellis died and recognized for the first time that she might have evidence related to his death.
Fearful to send it to police, she instead sought out Ellis’s sister, Monèt Carter-Mixon, on social media and shared the video with her.
Burbank’s lawyer, Brett Purtzer, cross-examined McDowell about an online spat she’d had with a supporter of the officers in which McDowell wrote that she was “lying” to testify against the officers. McDowell said that was a typo, and she intended to write that she was “dying” to tell her story.
Testimony will resume in Pierce County Superior Court on Wednesday, with McDowell under cross-examination.
