A chase, a tussle, a death. What is the Irmo Police Department still hiding? | Opinion
A month after two Irmo police officers restrained a man who went into cardiac arrest and never recovered or spoke to his family again, Police Chief Bobby Dale released body camera footage and audio of the altercation and said he’d meet with the dead man’s family to share more.
He could and should have done this weeks ago.
Instead, the chief’s painful series of slow disclosures over the course of a month, including Monday’s still incomplete picture, undermines trust in his department. This week, in his first news conference about the tragedy, Dale spoke only briefly, took no questions and omitted the fact that he is required by state law to share all the body-cam video with the man’s mother and lawyer.
Not everyone will see it my way in a society where many people never question law enforcement’s version of events. Some people will greet Dale’s disclosures with gratitude because the officers are OK and information was released at all. But others are already asking why only partial footage was released, with none showing the man exiting from his van or the scuffle that ensued.
Questions about this tragedy have dogged the department and bedeviled the family of Byron Jackson, 45, a maintenance man and father of six, since his death was announced on June 27, two days after he was declared dead and five days after the incident that left him on a ventilator in the hospital and, his brother said, without oxygen for 24 minutes.
The Irmo Police Department’s failure to disclose much improved on Monday but it’s still far from exemplary. Big questions linger: How exactly did Jackson die? And what exactly did the police do?
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is investigating, and the officers remain on administrative leave. They were identified Monday as Tyler Baker,with the department for 15 months, and John Parker, with the department for two years and two months.
Monday’s police statement says Baker used his Taser to “assist Parker in gaining control” and place Jackson in handcuffs. An earlier statement said a Taser was “deployed to subdue” Jackson “and safely place him under arrest.” Safely? Neither statement mentioned that Tasers aren’t infallible pieces of technology or that studies have determined the dart-to-heart distance that can make a Taser cause ventricular fibrillation, which is a distinct possibility.
Police haven’t said where they Tasered him and autopsy or investigative reports that might document that haven’t been completed.
“Our biggest question today is how did Mr. Jackson die?” Chief Dale said Monday at a news conference announced that morning and streamed live on the Irmo Police Department’s Facebook page. “The autopsy report is not ready. However, we know he had no physical injuries. But that’s the biggest question. The family wants to know. We all want to know.”
Dale said it took a month to release the video because SLED’s investigation limits information he can provide and because the department doesn’t have a public information officer.
Those are weak and unacceptable excuses.
If information is delayed because the department needs a PIO, it should hire one.
And state law does not prevent the release of the video at all. Rather, there’s precedent of South Carolina agencies releasing videos like it. In fact, the law says release is left to an agency’s “discretion,” and the nearby Richland County Sheriff’s Department has a repeated history of releasing its employee video and names after an incident. In May, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott released video of a man shot and killed by a deputy, and named him, the day it happened.
Look, officers have one of the hardest jobs on Planet Earth. They must routinely make split-second decisions and react in a world where predicting another person’s actions is impossible, especially in tense moments like those that unfolded in Irmo after 2 a.m. on Sunday, June 22, with at least a 30-second pursuit involving sirens and flashing lights and a confrontation with drawn service weapons.
There is little room for error.
Columbia attorney Bakari Sellers said he looks forward to going over the video “frame by frame” with Jackson’s family. Sellers stood alongside Jackson’s mother, some of Jackson’s siblings and children and other family members last week and asked the department to release the video so the family could get more answers.
“I think this is a lesson for law enforcement for the state and country,” Sellers said Monday. “Just be transparent from step one. Release names. Release videos. Because you fracture trust when you don’t.
“It appears Irmo’s story is constantly evolving, which is fine,” he added. “My family just wants answers. We’re not indicting the Irmo Police Department as of now. We’re just a family that wants to know what happened.”
It’s maddening that the picture is so unclear a month later.
Too many questions
A 2015 state law made South Carolina the first state to require all officers to use body cameras.
Before its passage, the South Carolina Sheriffs’ Association touted the technology as a way “to increase officer accountability and public trust.” Yet the law’s impact is unclear because even when the public demands to see video during high-profile cases, the release is often delayed or denied by talk of an ongoing investigation when a family’s uncertainty and a community’s unrest also matter.
Byron Jackson, 45, was detained Sunday, June 22, and declared dead at the hospital Wednesday, June 25. Irmo Police didn’t announce the “in-custody death” until Friday, June 27, at 4:36 p.m., identifying Jackson only by his age and not identifying the officers at all.
Instead, Dale said nothing for days about a police pursuit, the altercation that caused Jackson and two officers to tumble 20 feet down a ravine and the use of the Taser. He still hasn’t discussed some of the details like how a police incident report says Jackson was initially cuffed behind his back, then the cuffs were moved to his front so emergency medical services personnel “could provide care” and finally removed altogether at the request of EMS when Jackson’s “condition deterioriated.”
Instead of quickly releasing any video that would clearly show what happened, the Irmo police responded to the family’s pleas by downplaying Jackson’s death. At the end of last week, a spokeswoman was disputing that Jackson had even died in custody and saying that his detention shouldn’t be called an arrest because he’d never been read his Miranda rights or charged with a crime.
The heavily redacted incident report the department made public that same day lists three charges — one count of resisting arrest, one count of a traffic offense other than driving under the influence and one count of a suspicious act/person/vehicle. The notice about Monday’s news conference and a handout given to journalists there both also both labeled it an “in-custody death.”
Plain English should have made such hair splitting unnecessary, but that’s what the department was focused on instead of releasing the video and the 911 call as I and others requested. The bottom line is that Jackson had a medical emergency after being handcuffed, and he died. If he had regained consciousness at the hospital, he couldn’t have just walked out.
If he had recovered, he’d be alive. His family and friends wouldn’t be in mourning. And more might be known about what transpired.
I wrote a column within a few hours of receiving the initial release on Friday, June 27, asking for the officers to be named and the video to be released. There was no reason to withhold that then. And there was no reason to withhold it last week when the family and Sellers pleaded for it, and I wrote a second column, reiterating my request and sharing the pained voices of those who knew him.
With 150 seconds of a 911 call released Monday, at least that part of the incident crystallized.
Too few answers
The caller told a dispatcher about “a black male” “doing something kind of suspicious” in a van with its lights on that had been parked outside the caller’s house for 10 minutes. The caller twice told the dispatcher he had seen only one person in the vehicle, but he also said the man might be “fighting with somebody” and that he had heard him “screaming or talking to somebody.”
When an arriving officer “asked to see hands” and made verbal demands, Jackson drove away. Dale said Monday that the officers thought at the time that “there could be somebody else in the car based on the 911 call.”
They gave chase.
Numerous details about the tragedy remain unclear. What was Jackson, who lives in North Augusta, doing on Old Well Road in Irmo in the middle of the night? Why did he drive away from police? When confronted by officers with weapons drawn, did Jackson try to emerge from the vehicle with his hands up or did officers forcibly remove him? What was the verbal exchange between them?
There was no video shown at Monday’s news conference of what Chief Dale described as a “tussle” that ended 20 feet below the van in a ravine where Jackson was tased and cuffed. Dale left a microphone without fielding any questions about what happened.
All this means that no one will get a full picture of the entire event without seeing and hearing more. Police did not release any video or audio of what happened at the bottom of the ravine or when Jackson began having breathing difficulties or when the paramedics arrived or when the emergency personnel asked for Jackson’s handcuffs to be removed to offer medical support.
Questions remain about the officers’ initial contact with Jackson before he drove away from the 911 callers’ neighborhood and about what happened after the pursuit ended when Jackson’s van drove over some wooden pallets and came to a stop.
“Let me see your hands,” the first officer to approach the van at that point shouts out to Jackson, according to the audio released Monday. He says it two more times then adds, “Let me see your f------ hands.”
The public deserves to see the entire incident unfolding on video in all the video that’s available.
The department’s decision to release what it did was a step in the right direction. But until all the recordings are released — and until the family goes over it frame by frame — too many questions will swirl around Jackson’s death.
One will be: What is the Irmo Police Department hiding?
This story was originally published July 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A chase, a tussle, a death. What is the Irmo Police Department still hiding? | Opinion."