Advocates and community members gathered in West Baltimore Saturday afternoon for a march calling for accountability in the in-custody death of Dontae Melton Jr.
Melton died in the custody of Baltimore Police officers while experiencing an apparent mental health crisis in June, after waiting over an hour for medics to arrive. Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) ruled his death a homicide in August.
“[We’re here] to celebrate my son’s life, to make change, to hope that things get better, and no family would ever have to go through this again,” Melton’s mother, Eleshiea Goode, told The Baltimore Sun.
Goode was joined by other relatives of police-involved death victims, including Tawanda Jones, who helped organize the march with The West Coalition, named for her brother Tyrone West, who died during a traffic stop in 2013.
Also present was Greta Willis, whose 14-year-old son was fatally shot by Baltimore Police in her living room nearly 20 years ago. Willis led about 50 people in attendance in a prayer before the march.
“This young man should still be here,” said Jones of Melton, “his life should never have been snatched away.”
She guided the crowd through chants, shouting “cell blocks for killer cops,” as they made their way up Braddish Avenue to the intersection of West Franklin Street and North Franklintown Road, where Melton encountered Baltimore Police officers.
According to information and footage released by the Maryland Attorney General’s Independent Investigations Division, which investigates police-involved deaths, Melton approached a police vehicle at the intersection and asked for their help, telling them that he was being chased by an unidentified assailant.
After struggling and telling the officers he had trouble breathing, the officers restrained Melton while waiting for medics to arrive for more than an hour, eventually bringing him to a nearby hospital themselves, where he was pronounced dead.
Goode says that just a day earlier, she was in court attempting to file an emergency petition for her son, whom she says was acting strangely in the days leading up to his death.
She continued to state that she wants to see the city allocate more resources to behavioral health crisis intervention programs, as well as in its emergency dispatch system, which was in the middle of an outage while her son was in police custody.
Melton’s death came during a week that saw multiple police-involved deaths of individuals experiencing behavioral health crises, including 70-year-old Pytorcarcha Brooks. These deaths highlighted inadequacies in Baltimore’s behavioral crisis system, and the fact that it is being used less and less by emergency dispatchers.
So far, Melton’s is the only death involving Baltimore Police to be ruled a homicide after an audit showed that former Chief Medical Examiner Dr. David Fowler misclassified numerous deaths in police custody that should have been declared homicides.
“I just don’t believe the homicide ruling would have happened if it were not for people before me,” said Goode, who remarked on the kinship she feels with other relatives and loved ones of people who died during police encounters, “and thank god David Fowler is no longer in the medical examiner’s office.”
Have a news tip? Contact Mathew Schumer at mschumer@baltsun.com, 443-890-7423 or @mmmschumer on X.