#Video shows guards restrain inmate John Neville before his death

A North Carolina inmate fought for his life as jail guards restrained him — calling out for his mom and yelling “I can’t breathe” more than 25 times, disturbing videos show.

Harrowing footage released Wednesday show John Neville, 56, in a “hog-tie” position as he suffers labored breathing. The footage was taken Dec. 2 at Forsyth County jail in Winston-Salem.

Neville, a father of five, died at a local hospital two days later on Dec. 4 of a brain injury that was caused when his heart stopped beating, which deprived his brain of oxygen, according to his autopsy.

Five former jail officers and a nurse were charged in July with involuntary manslaughter in connection to Neville’s death.

In the newly-released body-camera footage from one of the guards, Neville is seen being informed by a nurse that he may have suffered a medical episode. The incident occurred just three days after he was arrested on charges of assaulting a woman.

“Are you ready to come out of it now?” the nurse asks in the 19-minute video. “It looks like you had a seizure.”

While a guard tells him to calm down, Neville struggles to get up and cries out saying, “Let me up, let me up. … Help me. Help me.”

At one point, Neville calls out for his mother, shouting, “Mama, mama!”

Then, a group of guards turn him over on his stomach and cuff his hands behind his back as he continues to struggle.

They place a white mesh hood over his head, stand him up, walk him through a door and strap him into a restraining chair.

In the second video, which is around 26 minutes long, Neville is transferred to a cell as he shouts, “Help me, somebody!”

Inside the cell, he’s removed from the chair and placed on a mattress as he yells, “I can’t breathe!”

He then shouts more than 25 times that he is unable to breathe and is placed with his arms behind his back and his legs folded in what has been described as a “hog-tie” position.

When Neville stops yelling, the officers ask him if he’s OK, though no response can be heard on the video.

The guards appear to leave the room, but the nurse outside the room appears to suggest that Neville isn’t breathing.

They reenter the room and the nurse tells the guard that she can’t detect a heart rate. She then requests a defibrillator and performs CPR on him.

Mike Grace, an attorney for the Neville family, said the video shows a “very definite lack of respect for human dignity, for human life, especially a black human life in jail.”

“The video won’t show anyone kicking Mr. Neville or hitting Mr. Neville or actively attacking him,” he said. “They just didn’t give a damn about him, and I don’t know which is worse. It was a life, according to the coroner, that he shouldn’t have died. Didn’t have to die.”

With Post wires