Jurors in the trial of three Tacoma police officers accused of killing a Black man in their custody in 2020 heard two very different stories Tuesday about the last night of the Manuel Ellis’ life. Prosecutors’ described how Ellis politely pleaded with police that he could not breathe even after he was tackled, punched in the head repeatedly, restrained into unconsciousness, shocked with a Taser and held to the ground. Doorbell security video captured his pleas for air, but assistant attorney general Kent Liu said officers Christopher Burbank, 38, and Matthew Collins, 40, denied hearing Ellis say anything intelligible when investigators questioned them.
“We know that all these three defendants heard him say it,” Liu said during his opening statement. “But they chose to do nothing. They didn’t help him.” Instead, Liu said, either Burbank or Collins told Ellis to shut up, punctuating the remark with an expletive. They then held the man to the pavement, and 200-pound officer Timothy Rankine knelt on his back while he slowly asphyxiated. Burbank’s attorney, Brett Purtzer, told jurors a different story.
The polite man who prosecutors said put his palms up in surrender when Collins moved to restrain him was not the man the three police officers encountered the night of March 3, 2020, Purtzer said. “The Manny Ellis they encountered was aggressive, he was violent, and he was extremely high on methamphetamine,” Purtzer said.
Burbank and Collins are accused of second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter in Pierce County Superior Court for the death of Ellis, who was walking home from a 7-Eleven when the deadly confrontation occurred. His death was ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner in summer 2020. Rankine, who responded to the scene as backup, is charged with second-degree manslaughter. The three police officers have pleaded not guilty, are free on bail and have remained on paid leave from the Tacoma Police Department.
Opening statements began Tuesday morning with Liu and Purtzer, and they continued in the afternoon with remarks from an attorney for Rankine, Anne Bremner. Collins’ attorneys reserved their opening statements until after the state has rested its case. Ellis’ sister and mother, Monét Carter-Mixon and Marcia Carter-Patterson, are scheduled to testify Wednesday for the prosecution. This is the first trial to test a new police-accountability law, Initiative 940, adopted by voters in 2018 and the state Legislature in 2019. The law removed a previous requirement that officers acted with malicious intent to be charged for hurting or killing someone on duty.
Assistant attorney general Liu told jurors it’s important to note that the defendants aren’t charged with intentional murder. He said the state needs to prove they acted in a criminally reckless manner that caused Ellis’ death. A jury of eight men and four women was seated Tuesday afternoon. The panel includes six white men, three white women, an Asian man, a Black man and a Black woman.
Collins and Burbank are white, and Rankine is Asian. All three defendants are U.S. Army combat veterans; three of the white men on the jury also served in the military. The trial is expected to last into December.
STATE PROSECUTORS’ OPENING STATEMENTS Prosecutors’ hour-plus of opening remarks drew the jury’s attention to several key pieces of their case. Liu told jurors how eyewitnesses at the intersection of 96th Street and Ainsworth Avenue — two people behind the patrol car, a pizza-delivery driver and a resident of a house on the street — have accounts that conflict with the officers’ statements. “What all four of these witnesses will tell you is that Mr. Ellis was not aggressive, was not violent, never attacked the officers,” Liu said. “In fact, it was the officers that were attacking Mr. Ellis. They all saw the same thing.”
Liu also described how Collins’ and Burbank’s use of a lateral neck restraint and repeated use of a Taser shot at Ellis’ chest were at odds with their police training. He said that after Ellis was restrained in handcuffs and hogtied behind his back, Collins and Burbank, contrary to their training, allowed Ellis to remain in restraints and on his stomach with Rankine on his back. Prosecutors ended their opening statements by addressing Ellis’ struggle with methamphetamine addiction and how he was behaving before his run-in with the defendants.
Liu told jurors they will hear from the defense about two times Ellis was arrested, in 2015 and 2019. In 2015 he was arrested with a needle in his back pocket, and Liu said jurors will hear from the defense that Ellis got upset, struggled with the officers and was hobbled and put in restraints. A similar police encounter occurred in 2019 when Sheriff’s Department deputies arrested Ellis for trying to rob a fast-food restaurant. The defense wants jurors to assume that because Ellis acted in a certain way in those instances, that must be how he acted in this case, Liu said. He said jurors will hear descriptions of Ellis growling or making animalistic noises in the encounter.
Liu instead pointed to the accounts of Ellis’ former girlfriend, his mother and several friends who spoke with him that night and found him to be his calm, happy self. Ellis spoke with them over the phone after attending a church revival where he played the drums. “The evidence will show Ellis was a human being who loved his family. He was flawed. He was trying to change his life,’ Liu said. “He was not an animal, and he deserved the respect and the care that he was not given that night.”
OPENING STATEMENTS FOR BURBANK Opening statements from lawyers for the officers focused on the meth in Ellis’ system and the level of force the officers used. Rankine’s attorney, Bremner, said Ellis’ meth level was double that of a typical lethal dose, and Purtzer told jurors that Burbank’s and Collins’ initial fight with Ellis was necessary to get the scene under control. Jurors will hear from an expert on use of force who will testify that Burbank and Collins did nothing inappropriate because they were still trying to make the scene safe, Purtzer said, and once they did, they had no further contact with him. They’ll also hear from medical experts who believe a meth overdose caused Ellis’ death, and that he would have died that night regardless of whether he and the officers met at the corner of 96th and Ainsworth.
Purtzer described the backgrounds of Burbank and Collins. Both men had been with TPD for about five years at the time. Burbank was previously a policeman in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and before that he was in the U.S. Army as an infantryman. Before Collins came to the police department, he was an Army Ranger for eight years. The officers worked the graveyard shift in Tacoma, and they patrolled Sector 4, which roughly comprises the city’s South End, Purtzer told jurors. “Their goals are twofold,” Purtzer said. “One, to do our job professionally, to return home to our families at the end of our shift. That had been their goals for the five years preceding this date, and that would still be their goals, but unfortunately on this particular night, Mr. Ellis had a different idea.”
Purtzer then told jurors about how the officers’ encounter with Ellis occurred from their perspective. The two had just completed a traffic stop at 96th and A Street, and, when they got to Ainsworth, they saw a man in the intersection, and they weren’t sure what he was doing.
Purtzer said it looked to them like he was trying to get into a vehicle that was turning. Collins was in the driver’s seat of their patrol car and Burbank in the passenger’s when Ellis came up to them, Purtzer said. He spoke rapidly, saying he had warrants. Collins told him to go to the curb, but as Ellis walked around the car, Purtzer said he became fixated on Burbank and told the officer he ought to punch him in the face. Ellis went for the passenger door, Purtzer said, but Burbank locked it and Ellis pounded on the window with his fists. Collins got out of the car, and as Ellis’ attention turned to him, Purtzer said Burbank opened his door to try to distract him, but it didn’t work and Ellis threw Collins to the ground with superhuman strength.
“It’s something that these officers have not faced before,” Purtzer said. “Something completely bizarre.” Burbank shot his Taser at Ellis, Purtzer said, and it had a temporary effect, but the attorney said Ellis was quickly engaged with Collins again. Purtzer said a second Taser shock wasn’t effective, and a lateral neck restraint used by Collins didn’t work, so Burbank fired his Taser again. At that point, Burbank and Collins were starting to panic, Purtzer said. Burbank had clicked his microphone twice, and then he screamed out “96th and Ainsworth,” according to the attorney.
Purtzer said Rankine and his partner, Masyih Ford, were rushing to their aid. Eight to 10 officers arrived while Ellis continued to thrash in restraints, Purtzer said, and by the time he was under control, 20 officers were there. The lawyer said that was long after the two minutes Burbank and Collins were grappling with Ellis. Purtzer went on to counter prosecutors’ claim that none of the civilian witnesses at the scene saw Ellis being aggressive, stating that they were ignoring the accounts of two others, a brother of the woman who lives on the street and another neighbor. The brother, a former Marine, will describe how he saw Ellis easily moving the officers trying to restrain him despite the heavy kits the officers wear, Purtzer said.
The other neighbor will testify he saw Ellis “manhandling” Burbank and Collins such that he asked the officers if they needed his help apprehending the man. Defendant Timothy Rankine whispers to defense attorney Anne Bremner on Tuesday in Pierce County Superior Court. Brian Hayes bhayes@thenewstribune.com
OPENING STATEMENTS FOR RANKINE Anne Bremner, an attorney for Rankine, told jurors in her opening remarks that her client came into the picture near the end of Ellis’ encounter with police, and that everything he did was to assist other officers. She also focused on Rankine’s training, telling jurors that he wasn’t trained on the hogtie used to restrain Ellis and that he isn’t the one who used it. She said Rankine wasn’t trained on the spit hood put over Ellis’ head and that when he was on the man’s back, he didn’t put all of his weight on him, only using enough restraint to control him.
Bremner told jurors how Rankine was born in Singapore and raised by a single mother until they moved to the United States and she married here. She described how as a boy, Rankine began to realize he wanted to do something with his life after seeing the events of Sept. 11, 2001, play out on his television. Rankine eventually joined the Army Rangers, Bremner said, and after his time in the military, he settled in Tacoma and decided to work as a police officer. “What they train at Tacoma Police Department, some say it’s about the same as what training a cosmetologist gets,” Bremner said. “But the training that he had, he followed to the T.” Bremner told jurors that prosecutors didn’t tell them about all the things Rankine did right the night Ellis died. She said he put Ellis in a recovery position on his side at one point, performed CPR on him to try to save his life and checked the man’s breathing, disputing prosecutors’ claims that Ellis struggled for air.
“There was never any training that said if someone says, ‘I can’t breathe,’ that that would be consistent with depleting air reserve,” Bremner said. “It’s a fair assumption that (if) he’s speaking, he’s also breathing” While Bremner spoke about Ellis’ ability to breathe, she accused prosecutors of trying to align the narrative around Ellis’ death with George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. She said the two cases are nothing alike. The attorney went on to call into question the truthfulness of the state’s expert witnesses, claiming that they formed their opinions without all of the facts in front of them.
She repeatedly returned to Ellis’ underlying health conditions and the level of meth in his system as the reason for his death, paying particular attention to the report of Dr. Thomas Clark, the former Pierce County medical examiner who performed Ellis’ autopsy. Manuel Ellis, 33, died March 3, 2020, while being restrained by Tacoma police. Courtesy photo Clark conducted the autopsy March 4, 2020, and found the cause of death was hypoxia due to physical restraint, with methamphetamine intoxication and heart disease contributing. Hypoxia is a deficiency in the amount of oxygen reaching body tissues. The autopsy report noted that the 2400 ng/mL of methamphetamine in Ellis’ system was an “extremely high” concentration, and the doctor said it could have caused death on its own.
Bremner latched onto that part of the report, telling jurors Clark said the meth concentration should be considered the primary factor in Ellis’ death. According to the report, Clark said an argument could be made that the meth in Ellis’ system should be considered the primary factor, and he also said that if meth had killed him, something such as ventricular fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat, would have caused his death, not hypoxia. Bremner called Ellis’ death tragic, but she said evidence will show he had an enlarged heart and compromised lungs due to many years of meth abuse. “That level of meth would have killed anybody in this room and everybody in this room,” Bremner said.
“That’s undisputed.” Experts for the state might dispute that. One, Dr. Curtis Veal, has said he believes meth played no role in Ellis’ death. Veal is an internal medicine, pulmonary and critical care specialist who has worked at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle since 1990. Citing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, he said normal concentrations of meth in recreational usage range from 10 to 2500 ng/mL.
Bremner, who successfully defended Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer during his false-reporting trial last year, ended her remarks by telling jurors this was a case that never should have been brought, and she warned them against prosecutors who only put on “partial facts.” “Use your common sense as jurors to decide this case,” Bremner said. “At the end of the evidence, we submit to you that the evidence will permit you, it will lead you and it will ultimately compel you to find officer Rankine not guilty.”
