When a state doctor tried to figure out how a former Johnson C. Smith University football player died in police custody, her counterparts at the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation were reluctant to give her details, newly filed documents show.

A recorded call shows a doctor with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner pressed SBI agents for straight answers on how Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers handled Jovontay Williams before he died in their custody.

The agents evaded. The doctor told them she'd bring in another investigator. If she didn’t get answers, she warned, she would find the 32-year-old Black man’s cause of death to be “a big, fat undetermined.”

Only then did agents get specific. Even then, what they said turned out to be at odds with what video shows.

A transcript filed in the Williams family’s federal civil lawsuit against the city of Charlotte captures the call between the two state agencies in a level of detail that wouldn’t be disclosed in a criminal investigation.

The SBI agents involved and agency Director Chip Hawley declined to be interviewed for this story.

‘I can’t breathe’

Williams died at 32 years old. The Charlotte native was humble and patient, his coach previously told the Observer, and in 2013 became an All-American defensive lineman at JCSU — a title the school hadn’t seen since 2008. After college, he stayed in Charlotte, worked for himself and became a father.

At 2:15 a.m. on Jan. 3, 2022, CMPD officers were responding to a call a woman had made from inside her bedroom closet on Featherstone Drive in northeast Charlotte. Someone was outside and shooting, she said, and they might be trying to get inside.

When police responded, a neighbor flagged them down. Someone they didn’t know was on their back porch, they told officers.

It was Williams.

He was about 30 minutes from his own home, according to police. Officers tackled him onto the back-porch planks, cuffed his hands behind his back — rocking him between his stomach and his side — and kept him there as 3 a.m. drew nearer.

They later found his gun and a bullet casing from it nearby. A baggie with something white inside was on the porch, too, police video shows.

“I can’t breathe,” Williams told police. “If I die, it’s on you.”

“You’re OK,” officers told him after asking if he was hurt. “We’re here to help you, alright? Just take some deep breaths. In through your nose and out through your mouth.”

One officer asked: “You want to sit him up?”

More than 20 minutes passed, and officers kept Williams laying on the ground. Paramedics hoisted Williams’ unconscious body onto their truck at 2:43 a.m. He died at the hospital seven hours later.

As a medical examiner studied how he died, she struggled to get clarity from the state agents in charge of determining whether criminal charges should be filed against the CMPD officers. At one point, the best she had was a play-by-play from an SBI supervisor playing video on his computer while on the phone.

“Is he saying he can’t breathe?” the doctor asked during a phone call with the supervisor, a transcript shows.

“No,” the supervisor said. “He’s just moaning.”

He later told the doctor Williams was saying he couldn’t breathe. The civil lawsuit Williams’ family filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina contends Williams told police he couldn’t breathe four times. Video shows the same.

He also brought up Williams’ drug use and suggested the presence of fentanyl. An autopsy later showed there was no fentanyl in Williams’ system.

Williams’ mother claims police policies weren’t sufficient to save her son from “restraint-induced homicide.”

‘A big, fat undetermined’

The SBI eventually let Dr. Susan Venuti see the body-camera footage herself, according to her autopsy. But in the now-transcribed call on Aug. 2, 2022, agents did not want to give her access to the video as she studied Williams’ body two months after his death.

“I keep reading in the medical records that he was put down by law enforcement, and I don’t know what that means,” Venuti said to an SBI agent.

The agent said police “took him down to the ground.” Video shows an officer pushed him onto the back porch, and they both fell with a thud onto the wooden planks.

“Was he restrained?” the doctor asked.

“Briefly,” the agent replied.

Video shows Williams was restrained for at least 22 minutes.

“You know, I can’t do my job if you don’t share the information with me,” the doctor replied.

“I don’t want to tell you something wrong,” the agent said.

“You’re going to get a big, fat undetermined if you don’t help me with this,” the doctor said.

Venuti asked if there was body-camera footage of the incident. There was, the agent replied.

“And did you look at the body cam footage?” the doctor asked.

“Yes. He was — he was assisted down to the ground by law enforcement,” the agent replied. “That’s what — that’s what I was told, and that’s what I saw on the — on the footage, was taken down to the ground.”

“I know you guys are hesitant to share that information with us, but, you know, I’m the one that has to sign the death certificate,” the doctor said. “The family is going to want to know what’s going on, and I’m going to have to say, ‘I have no idea.’”

Only after she said she wanted to involve an investigator did the agent patch in an SBI supervisor.

“Mr. — let me see,” SBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Adam Loflin says. “Is his last name Williams? I don’t recall.”

Dr. Venuti replied: “Williams.”

She again asked to see the body camera video to be able to determine if officers applied pressure to Williams’ back and caused bruises or strained his breathing. Loflin said he wasn’t sure if sharing video was allowed and that the Mecklenburg medical examiner’s office has “never asked” to see such video.

“We don’t take these cases lightly in the Raleigh office,” she said before adding: “I don’t know how they do things in Mecklenburg.”

SBI agents showed medical examiners police video all the time, she said.

As the doctor asked specific questions about how Williams was tackled, Loflin responded that Williams was 30 minutes away from his home, that he was “screaming just like a wild person,” and that he had played football in college at “John C. Wells.”

The agent working under Loflin corrected him: “Johnson C. Smith.”

No fentanyl

Loflin also offered that Williams’ mother said he had previously smoked marijuana regularly and that a police report suggested he could have used other drugs.

Williams and a friend once subleased a woman’s apartment, the supervisor said during his call with the doctor, and when she came home she found “nothing but drug paraphernalia, used condoms, beer bottles and, like, leftover cocaine residue all over the house … you know, unofficially, he may have had a substance abuse problem further than the use of marijuana. But we have seen marijuana laced with fentanyl in some other counties in our district.”

A toxicologist did not find fentanyl in Williams’ blood but did find cocaine, marijuana and the same compound that is in Xanax.

After the SBI gave police video to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Venuti included in her autopsy timestamps of when officers helped Williams down, rocked him back onto his stomach and said he couldn’t breathe. The medical examiner ultimately found that Williams died from “complications of multisystem organ failure,” an enlarged heart and “cocaine toxicity with hyperthermia.”

The cause of those complications “is best classified as undetermined,” the autopsy says.

“The degree to which the arrest and restraint contributed to death, if any, is uncertain.”

How the information got out

SBI public information officer Chad Flowers declined to answer questions on whether the agents were disciplined and told The Charlotte Observer the transcript should have been under seal and never should have been public.

Micheal L. Littlejohn, the attorney who represents the Williams family, declined to comment. A protective court order says that the SBI report is not to be shared outside a list of specific courthouse players. It also says the report cannot be sealed and kept from the public without a formal motion asking the judge to seal it.

Neither Littlejohn, the city of Charlotte nor the CMPD officers have asked to seal the transcript referenced in this story. A hearing on attorneys’ motions for summary judgment — where a judge will decide what points, if any, will go to a jury — is scheduled for Monday afternoon.

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