Days earlier than his personal dying, Louisiana Grasp Trooper Chris Hollingsworth walked right into a safe room deep inside state police headquarters, swore an oath and informed investigators in regards to the evening he held down Black motorist Ronald Greene and repeatedly bashed him within the head with a flashlight.
Gone was the bravado from Hollingsworth’s earlier boast _ captured on body-camera video _ that he “beat the ever-living f-_” out of the person earlier than his 2019 dying alongside a rural roadside in northeast Louisiana.
As an alternative, in a two-hour interrogation, Hollingsworth meekly portrayed himself because the sufferer within the violent arrest, saying he feared for his life at the same time as graphic footage performed time and again of white troopers swarming Greene’s automotive after a high-speed chase, jolting him with stun weapons, punching him within the face and dragging him by his ankle shackles as he wailed, “I’m your brother! I’m scared! I’m scared!”
“I used to be scared,” Hollingsworth mentioned within the never-before-released recorded interview obtained by The Related Press. “He may have accomplished something as soon as my maintain was broke off him _ and that’s why I struck him.”
Detectives weren’t shopping for it, describing the repeated flashlight blows to Greene’s head as unjustified whereas peppering the 46-year-old veteran trooper with questions. Why did Hollingsworth flip off his body-camera video recorder? Why did he jolt Greene along with his stun gun earlier than the motorist may even get out of his automotive? Why did he resort to disproportionate power with an unarmed man who was hardly resisting?
As for troopers’ preliminary account that blamed Greene’s dying on accidents from a automotive crash, fueling allegations of a cover-up, Hollingsworth mentioned he didn’t see such accidents himself however added, “I’m not a physician.”
Almost three years after Greene’s Might 10, 2019, dying with nonetheless nobody criminally charged, Hollingsworth’s inside affairs interview in September 2020 stands as a defiant, haunting voice from the grave.
Broadly seen as essentially the most culpable of the half-dozen officers concerned, Hollingsworth can’t face justice as a result of he died simply six days after the interrogation from a high-speed, single-vehicle, crash that got here hours after he was informed he can be fired for his function in Greene’s arrest.
Although his dying was dominated unintentional, Hollingsworth’s early morning, off-duty crash right into a freeway guardrail in Monroe prompted widespread hypothesis the trooper took his personal life. Hollingsworth was sober, not carrying a seatbelt and was a state police driving teacher touring an interstate he had patrolled for many years. Crash reconstruction specialists who reviewed case experiences for the AP agreed the circumstances had been suspicious and the probe by native police was insufficient.
“It’s positively according to a suicide however I don’t have sufficient data to say he didn’t go to sleep,” mentioned Jonathan Cherney, a California-based crash reconstructionist. “However I’ll let you know what, you’ve gotten a tough time falling asleep whenever you’re doing 100 miles per hour.”
Scott Wolleson, the lawyer who accompanied Hollingsworth to the interview and now represents his widow in a civil swimsuit introduced by Greene’s household, declined to remark.
Intentional or not, Hollingsworth’s dying has difficult ongoing federal and state investigations and was notably painful for Greene’s mom, Mona Hardin, who says it robbed her of any hope for full justice whereas the trooper was allowed to be buried with full honors regardless of his misconduct.
“It hurts me to the core that Hollingsworth isn’t right here,” Hardin informed AP. “He was entrance and middle and so they gave him all of the bells and whistles on his burial. … They neglected what he did, what he confessed to.”
State police had been so involved about “unruly teams” and a “main disturbance” at Hollingsworth’s funeral, in line with operational plans obtained by AP, that they saved the placement of the providers secret and deployed two “counter snipers” and a SWAT group to observe over the ocean of blue uniforms that piled right into a West Monroe church.
The bristling safety was arrange at a time when the general public had not but the seen the body-camera footage of Greene’s arrest, however the state police leaders coordinating his funeral had.
Serving as “platoon chief” that day was Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking officer on the scene of Greene’s dying who stays beneath federal scrutiny for allegedly withholding his personal body-camera footage from detectives.
AP final yr obtained and revealed the graphic footage that officers from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards on down had refused to launch for greater than two years. However even earlier than that, Hollingsworth made himself a spotlight of the Greene investigation by his personal phrases on the evening of the arrest, what he dismissed to detectives as “inappropriate cop speak.”
“I beat the ever-living f— out of him, choked him and all the pieces else making an attempt to get him beneath management,” Hollingsworth informed a fellow officer in a telephone name picked up on his body-camera mic. “Rapidly he simply went limp. … I believed he was useless.”
Greene died earlier than his ambulance reached the hospital. Hollingsworth was photographed there with flecks of Greene’s blood dotting his blue uniform and brass badge.
The governor later informed police commanders to analyze Hollingsworth’s function within the lethal arrest. Edwards’ prime lawyer, Matthew Block, informed AP the then-head of the state police knowledgeable him when the choice was lastly made to fireplace Hollingsworth. Edwards has since come to explain the actions of the troopers in Greene’s arrest as felony and racist.
Requested late final yr whether or not he feels any accountability for the lack of public belief in state police, a spokesperson for Edwards informed AP: “The troopers on the scene _ notably Trooper Hollingsworth _ are liable for what occurred the evening of Mr. Greene’s dying, interval.”
Federal prosecutors have been contemplating for months whether or not to cost the opposite troopers, together with Kory York, who stays on the power after dragging Greene face down by his ankle shackles. The FBI is also investigating whether or not state police brass obstructed justice partly by rebuffing the detectives who pushed for felony prices. One supervisor just lately informed a state legislative committee probing the case that his bosses instructed him to not give prosecutors the body-camera footage of Greene’s arrest.
That was according to an AP investigation final yr that discovered Greene’s was amongst a minimum of a dozen instances over the previous decade wherein state police troopers or their bosses ignored or hid proof of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct.
Hollingsworth himself appeared to acknowledge his authorized danger, refusing to offer any assertion to the detectives conducting the felony investigation within the days after Greene’s dying.
However he was compelled _ 496 days later _ to cooperate with an inside affairs investigation targeted on whether or not he violated state police coverage. That inquiry couldn’t be used to cost Hollingsworth however would decide whether or not he saved his badge.
Hollingsworth’s story advanced considerably in the course of the interview. He initially informed detectives he struck Greene with “a closed fist.” Then he claimed he couldn’t keep in mind whether or not he struck him with an object.
Lastly, after the investigators replayed the video and identified Hollingsworth’s flashlight, he conceded to hitting Greene with it, even utilizing his water bottle to display how he swung with the rounded edge down.
Detectives then confirmed Hollingsworth post-mortem photographs and requested him to explain a number of cuts on Greene’s head.
“They’re like slightly half-moon,” Hollingsworth mentioned.
“You don’t assume your flashlight brought about these cuts?”
“It may have,” the trooper mentioned.
A reexamined post-mortem commissioned by the FBI final yr rejected the crash concept and attributed Greene’s dying to “bodily wrestle,” troopers repeatedly gorgeous him, putting him within the head, restraining him at size and Greene’s use of cocaine.
Requested to justify his use of power, Hollingsworth repeatedly exaggerated Greene’s risk and resistance.
“I did concern that he was a lot larger than I used to be and far stronger,” he mentioned. “He had already saved two troopers from having the ability to handcuff him, and I used to be in concern at the moment of him getting management of me or headbutting me.”
Race didn’t come up within the interrogation however Hollingsworth opined on the topic many years earlier in a 2002 essay on the Louisiana State Police Coaching Academy, writing that “white law enforcement officials need to show they aren’t racist on each criticism and in each court docket case involving blacks.”
“At the moment, the primary concern is that if the officer is white and the suspect is black. … Race is the problem and never the crime.”
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