For the past several weeks, the
media has been buzzing with the question of whether it’s possible
(or probable) that
21-year-old Chavis Carter committed suicide while handcuffed in
the backseat of a Jonesboro, AR, police cruiser. Now, it seems that
the Craighead County Coroner’s Office has
made its decision — this was suicide. Ballistics tests and
and an FBI investigation are forthcoming, and the released
dashcam footage is frustratingly inconclusive, though the chief
of police Michael Yates says the footage and witness testimonies
“tend to support” the police claims that Carter shot himself. One
police officer expresses confusion as to where Carter got the gun
after he has apparently shot himself, adding credence to the
police’s story.

The coroner,whose report was released to the press after a

Freedom of Information Act request, concluded that Carter’s
cause of death:

Perforating gunshot wound of head, going through the right
temporal scalp and skull, right and left frontal temporal
brain, exiting left temporal skull and scalp.
 Perforating gunshot wound of head, going through the right
temporal scalp and skull, right and left frontal temporal
brain, exiting left temporal skull and scalp.  

[…]

Path:  Primarily right to left, with small backward and
downward deviation. 

Since the July 29 incident, Jonesboro police have
“reenacted” how Carter, or other people of varying heights and
builds, could have shot themselves in the head while cuffed. Still,
there’s a lingering racial paranoia here, considering that Carter
was black and the officers were white, and that just happens when a
black male dies in police custody. Carter’s mother continues to say
that her son was left handed, making his supposed suicide by
gunshot to the right temple even more unlikely.

Even if the police story checks out, it’s still frustrating that
Carter ended up being arrested for “suspicious driving” and then
detained for giving police a fake name in order to disguise the
notion that he had slipped away from a
Mississippi drug deferment program…for one count of selling
marijuana. Carter may not have been pure as the driven snow, he may
even have stolen the gun that killed him, since it was reported as
such a month before, but even so, he didn’t need to be in the back
of that car at all. It’s hard not to wistfully think that with no
drug war, the cops would always have bigger criminals to fry.

And, it’s hard to ignore a few of the other questions on the
coroner’s report, namely whether or not Carter had gunshot residue
on his hands (still unresolved), and the simple fact that “the
manner of death is based on both autopsy findings and
the investigative conclusions of the Jonesboro Police
Department.” It’s unsettling when police departments investigate
themselves. But even if this is no dramatic cover-up, it’s
surely some serious negligence. Jonesboro police should seriously
reconsider bringing back the officers responsible for searching
Carter at least.