A FATEFUL RIDE : He ‘saw’ cars full of police following
Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006
This is the first of two articles about Bobby Joe Rylee, 61, who died five days after a July 15 altercation with Russellville police officers. Staff writer Debra Hale-Shelton is reviewing a nearly 6-inch-thick investigative case file. Today’s story focuses on Rylee’s apparent state of mind before his arrest and the medical records included in the file. Saturday’s article will deal with what happened after Rylee was taken to jail.
A tired and frightened Bobby Joe Rylee anticipated a confrontation with Russellville police early in the morning of July 15, according to the woman who was with him at the time.
“Look in your rearview mirror,” he told Sarah Lowery, a passenger in his pickup, after a patrol unit came up behind him on Arkansas 7, its blue lights flashing. “I told you the police are after me.”
Rylee pulled his pickup, and the trailer of tree limbs he was hauling, into a parking lot beside a still-busy Waffle House restaurant just before 1: 30 a. m.
“I am tired of being afraid, and I am going to make them do their damage in front of a lot of witnesses,” he said. Moments later, the 61-year-old Rylee was struggling with two police officers. Within hours, he quit breathing and was rushed to a hospital, where he never regained consciousness. He was taken off a ventilator and died with his family at his hospital bedside five days later.
A review of the voluminous investigative case file amassed after Rylee’s death reveals these and other details about the police fight and its fatal consequences. Transcripts of interviews and medical records show that Rylee had intensely distrusted the local police for years. The transcripts depict a quiet, polite man who wanted to work but was dealing with a mental illness and couldn’t hold a job. He was a Baptist who did not drink and a divorced man who was close to his three adult daughters.
On Monday, Rylee’s family filed a federal court lawsuit accusing Russellville police officers of brutally beating Rylee, and county jail deputies of refusing him medical treatment.
Prosecuting Attorney David Gibbons of Clarksville released the case file to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The prosecutor concluded in August that the officers’ force used to subdue Rylee was justified, saying the ballpoint pen that Rylee used to stab one of the officers was a deadly weapon. The Arkansas medical examiner said Rylee suffered a broken back with spinal-cord injury. The FBI is investigating.
Gibbons exonerated the officers after reading witnesses ’ statements about the parkinglot fight. (A crowd did gather, as Rylee purportedly had hoped. ) The prosecutor also examined medical documents, listened to 911 audiotapes and reviewed a 6-year-old scrape between Rylee and the Russellville police.
In her statement to investigators, Lowery said she and Rylee met at a truck stop about midnight July 13 and had visited an old, frequently vandalized schoolhouse where he told her he lived. Late on the night of July 14, they ran into each other again, this time in an Exxon service station. He asked her to go with him “to see something,” and she agreed, thinking he wanted to give her a tour of the schoolhouse.
Instead, Lowery said, Rylee told her he was being followed, as the two drove along Arkansas 7 toward Dardanelle, and he asked her to “keep an eye on the people in the other cars.”
She said Rylee “stated that the three cars parked at Century Tel [a phone company ] were full of cops spying on him.” Later, he pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot, where he jotted down numerous license-plate numbers and circled a car with two young people inside.
“He claimed that these were police officers’ kids who had been hired to follow him,” Lowery said.
Rylee believed the police were blocking his phone calls, and he tried to make some calls while in the pickup, “but seemed [too ] tired or lacking in concentration that he couldn’t dial the numbers correctly,” according to Lowery.
At one point, he placed a pillow and what appeared to be a military-issue knife “or something similar” between himself and Lowery.
“He said, ‘I don’t mean to scare you, but this knife needs to be where I can reach it and so the police, if they pull me over, won’t accuse me of concealing a weapon,” Lowery said in the statement.
“I said, ‘ Why do you need a knife ?’
“ He said, ‘Because the police want to take me to jail and kill me. ’”
He then drove over an overpass and got behind an Arkansas State Police trooper, whom he began tailgating, according to Lowery.
“I said, ‘ Why don’t you leave them alone, and maybe they will leave you alone ?’
“ He said, ‘No I’m tired of being scared, and I’m going to push the issue. ’”
Sometime after 1 a. m., the two returned to the Exxon station at Lowery’s request. Unbeknownst to Rylee, Lowery alerted a clerk there to Rylee’s behavior. She recalled saying, “I think someone needs to find a reason to pull [this ] guy over. He hasn’t slept, drank or eaten right in days. He is scared and has got a knife.”
The clerk called 911 about 1: 20 a. m. About 10 minutes later, police arrested and subdued Rylee, then took him to the Pope County jail. The charge was disorderly conduct. More than six hours later, he was taken to a Russellville hospital, then was transferred to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center in Little Rock, where he died about 8: 05 a. m. on July 20.
MEDICAL HISTORY Rylee’s oldest daughter, Suzy Turnbow of Pottsville, also placed a call on the morning of the arrest. She called her father on a cell phone, which he handed to Lowery. “She said that her father had not had enough sleep, food, or water and that she and her family were very concerned,” Lowery told police. Less than three days earlier, on July 12, Turnbow reportedly told a Pope County sheriff ’s deputy that she and other family members were concerned because Rylee had not been taking his medication properly, according to Pope County Sheriff Jay Winters.
That day, Rylee had summoned sheriff’s deputies to the schoolhouse.
“He had called the sheriff’s office with a concern about some trespassers on his property,” Winters said in an interview earlier this month. “Once the officers arrived up there, there was concern about his behavior, that he was not acting quite right.”
Rylee talked of animals coming onto his property under the control of someone not on the premises, the sheriff said.
“So, obviously, that’s not normal behavior,” Winters said.
The Rylee case file also relates Rylee’s medication needs. It contains a handwritten letter signed by Turnbow and dated Aug. 23, 2000, in which she pleads with a physician to treat her father.
“I know you probably don’t normally see ‘ mentally ill’ patients, but I’m asking you to consider Bob Rylee if at all possible,” she wrote.
“My dad is in very serious need of medication, and I think I’ve finally convinced him to take it regularly,” the letter stated. “We need a doctor we can count on. … So please, I pray that you can help my dad.”
Gibbons said in a telephone interview this week that the mental-health background added context to Rylee’s behavior on July 14-15. As to whether it influenced his findings, Gibbons said, “It wasn’t particularly relevant other than the fact that it gave credence to the fact that he [Rylee ] was the initial aggressor.”
Also in the case file is a letter dated March 23, 1999, from a staff psychiatrist at the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock. In it, Dr. Laurance Reid identified himself as Rylee’s physician during an almost two-month stay there that year.
“Mr. Rylee’s discharge diagnosis was Major Depressive Disorder, Depressive Disorder, Recurrent, Severe,” Reid wrote.
(Records from the UAMS hospital in Little Rock, where Rylee died, show “depression bi-polar disorder” on a patienthistory form. )
Reid’s letter included the following medical history:
Rylee was first hospitalized for the illness in 1988 at St. Vincent Infirmary in Little Rock and “responded somewhat to antidepressants.” In 1996, Rylee was treated at another facility with Prozac and, briefly, with electroconvulsive therapy. He returned to Russellville and tried to work but “was never quite the same,” according to one of his daughters. Rylee again became severely depressed in the fall of 1998.
“During a 3-4 month period, he became extremely withdrawn, rarely left the house, and found no pleasure in any aspect of living.... He ate perhaps one meal per day. He lost 20-30 pounds. He slept but 1-2 hours each night. He required daily attention from his daughters,” the letter said.
Reid called Rylee a “pleasant and well-mannered gentleman.” He also noted that Rylee and his family were told of “the absolute importance of continued treatment with medications,” specifically Prozac, Desyrel, lithium carbonate and Ritalin. His letter concluded that “Rylee will always remain somewhat impaired and dysfunctional.”
The case file includes an account of Rylee’s visit on March 4, 2000, to the emergency room of St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Russellville with second-degree burns on his feet. A physician’s report stated that Rylee was a manic-depressive, adding, “Apparently he has been off medication for quite some time, refusing medication and treatment up to this point.”
The report said Rylee burned his feet and his right calf after he apparently “mixed about 15 gallons of bleach and 400 gallons of water and poured them on his carpet to bleach it white from earth tone. This did not change the color as expected so he walked in and tried to scrub it.” Three days later, when he sought treatment, his feet were swollen, and the skin was sloughing off in places.
ARREST IN 2000 Just days before that hospital visit, Rylee had filed a complaint alleging harassment and excessive force by at least two Russellville police officers during a Feb. 24, 2000, traffic stop. The police chief at that time, James L. Wade, concluded that his officers acted properly. Police said Rylee refused to get out of a limousine he was driving and complained that he had been stopped without a valid reason, according to the case file. Officer Ruddy Short said he stopped Rylee between 2 a. m. and 3 a. m. after noticing that he was driving with his headlights on high. Short said Rylee first stopped in the inside lane of Arkansas 7, and, at one point, blocked both southbound lanes. A second officer, meantime, showed up as backup. Short said, “Rylee began yelling out the window, uh, God and Jesus Christ have instructed me not to exit my [vehicle ], have instructed me not to get out of my car.”
Rylee said an officer “pulled a weapon, put it close to my head and cocked the gun and said, get out, Mr. Rylee. I said, no,” according to a transcript in the case file.
Later, however, Rylee said he didn’t actually see a gun but heard the “cocking of a pistol.” Told that the police weapons were automatics without cocking devices, Rylee said, “In my mind, that’s what it seemed like, but, uh, it felt like there was a gun there and I heard, in my mind, I heard a gun being cocked.”
Rylee said the officers pulled him from the car, and peppersprayed and handcuffed him. He said he was bruised “by being dragged on the asphalt,” but he did not seek medical attention.
Short said the officers never drew their weapons and never dragged Rylee over the pavement, except for his heels. He said he did administer an aerosol defensive spray.
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