Dinwiddie County’s new commonwealth’s attorney has moved to drop murder charges against five defendants accused in the death of Irvo Otieno in 2023.
Initially, 10 defendants were charged last year with second-degree murder of the 28-year-old in a case that rocked the nation after video surfaced of a shackled Otieno being held down by multiple officers and hospital personnel. The case raised questions of how the mentally ill are treated in the justice system.
Later, charges were dropped against two hospital employees who appeared to have the least amount of contact with Otieno in video showing his death.
The latest move, first reported by television news station WTVR, would bring the number of defendants down to three.
People are also reading…
Otieno died in the custody of the Henrico County Sheriff’s Office on March 6, 2023.
He died at Central State Hospital after he had been transferred there from a Henrico jail. Video from security cameras in the facility showed his death while being restrained by deputies and hospital workers.
Dinwiddie Commonwealth’s Attorney Amanda Mann requested the dismissals in a motion filed on Friday. The motion has to go before a judge for approval.
In court documents, she questioned the order of the trials arranged by her predecessor, Jonathan Bourlier, whom she narrowly defeated to win the election last November.
“The current elected Commonwealth’s Attorney does not find the order to be sound and competent prosecutorial decision making,” Mann wrote in her motion. “The order in which the defendants are tried is of strategic importance to the Commonwealth.”
The motion states that the court had previously denied a motion to restructure the order of the trials.
Mann, who did not return requests for comment on Saturday afternoon, may yet move to reindict the five defendants as a way to reorder their trial dates.
Mann is asking the Dinwiddie Circuit Court to drop charges against five Henrico sheriff’s deputies: Randy Boyer, Dwayne Bramble, Jermaine Branch, Bradley Disse and Tabitha Levere. Mann filed identical motions in each case.
The defendants remaining are Central State Hospital employee Wavie Jones, as well as Henrico sheriff’s deputies Kaiyell Sanders and Brandon Rodgers.
In a separate video of Otieno’s detention at the Henrico jail, Sanders was seen punching Otieno several times in his cell.
Currently, Sanders’ trial would occur after the trials of Boyer, Bramble, Branch, Disse and Levere. Dinwiddie’s prior elected commonwealth’s attorney, Ann Cabell Baskervill, charged all 10 defendants in the wake of Otieno’s death. Baskervill described Sanders as “the most culpable” in an interview she gave in April 2023.
“I trust that jurors will have the opportunity to render verdicts at the earliest opportunity,” Baskervill said when asked to respond to Mann’s dismissal motion.
Henrico police initially detained Otieno, who struggled with mental illness, on March 3, three days before his death. Police brought him to Parham Doctors Hospital’s crisis unit, where staff tried to sedate him with medication.
An external report commissioned by the federal agency that regulates publicly funded hospitals found that he never saw a psychiatrist during a six-hour stay. Nor was his mother, Caroline Ouko, allowed in from the hospital’s waiting room.
Henrico police arrested him on charges of assaulting an officer while in his hospital bed. Deputies continued to struggle with him at the jail and ultimately sought his transfer to Central State — a maximum-security psychiatric facility in Dinwiddie.
In an intake room at the hospital, Otieno, a former basketball and football player who weighed 270 pounds, is pinned under the weight of seven deputies and three hospital employees.
CCTV footage shows Otieno’s progression from reactive to limp while being restrained. He was later pronounced dead. A medical examiner ruled his death homicide by asphyxiation.
In March, on the one-year anniversary of her son’s death, Ouko said her pain has not dulled and that she visits her son’s gravestone daily. It is marked by two flags: one from Kenya and another from the United States.
On that day, Ouko expressed her wish that Mann mete out justice in all of the cases she inherited when she won the job.
“All I’m asking is she’ll do the right thing and aggressively prosecute the eight murder indictments of Irvo Otieno,” Ouko said. “Because anything less would be an affront. Not just to me and my family, but to the African American community as a whole.”