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Roger Owensby Jr. was the 14th African-American man killed by Cincinnati Police officers in five years.
Nearly two years after his death, the police department has not released its internal investigation into the event. The city's Office of Municipal Investigations has not yet released its report. Nor has the FBI.
Owensby's death has more than its share of ironies and oddities:
· In the trial of Officer Robert Jorg, Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor Tom Longano repeatedly referred to the officers' search of Owensby as "a little bit of a pat-down." Owensby's family nickname was Little Bit; he had been born two months premature, weighing only 3.5 pounds.
· What happened at the Sunoco Mini-Mart where Owensby died is both conceptually and literally fuzzy. Instead of relying on the original videotape made by the store's surveillance cameras, Cincinnati Police officers dubbed it by setting up a tripod and camera and taping a copy from a television monitor. Comments from the audience in the office can be heard, and an arm comes into view to turn off the monitor at the end of the tape.
· The original tape was a digital system confiscated from the owner of the Sunoco Mini-Mart. At trial, however, prosecutors used the poor quality dub rather than the original digital tape, according to Mark Tillar, attorney for the Owensby family.
· CityBeat provided the Owensbys and their attorneys a copy of the videotape; they had not seen it since the trial. CityBeat obtained the tape from Gary Jorg, the accused officer's father.
· Robert Jorg's civil attorney, William Gustavson, hired Dr. Charles Wetli, chief medical examiner for Suffolk County, N.Y., to review the case. Wetli says Owensby died of a "cardiac event." Wetli is considered an expert in "voodoo" and Santeria — a Caribbean religion that uses animal sacrifice. He was the first to coin the term "cocaine induced agitated delirium" in the mid-1980s. The term describes sudden death during restraint.Owensby had no cocaine in his system at the time of death, according to the Hamilton County Coroner.
· Owensby's autopsy showed his lungs were 2.5 times their normal weight due to being saturated with edema fluid.The amount of visible congestion and tissue swelling is not consistent with a heart attack but rather asphyxia, the county coroner ruled.
