State officials in Mississippi are investigating the death of an unarmed black man who was killed in a physical struggle with a police officer while saying “I can’t breathe”, according to his attorney.

Jonathan Sanders suffered “some kind of asphyxiation” during an altercation with white officer Kevin Harrington on Wednesday night, in the small town of Stonewall, in the eastern part of the state, said the attorney, J Stewart Parrish.

Sanders, 39, was a father of two children including a one-year-old, according to his family.

Parrish told several local media outlets that Harrington pulled Sanders from a horse and choked him to death with a flashlight. Parrish told the Guardian on Friday that allegation had come from relatives who live beside the site of the struggle and witnessed it.

But Stonewall police chief Michael Street denied the details of the attorney’s allegations, telling the Guardian the two men engaged in “a fight” without weapons after Sanders voluntarily stepped down from a horse-drawn buggy.



“We won’t know until the autopsy is over what was the actual cause of death,” said Street. “But there was no flashlight used to choke anybody – that’s false. And there were no shots fired by either man, there were no weapons at all, and he was not dragged off a horse.”

Parrish described the chief’s denial as “a difference without a distinction” because Sanders “was choked to death”, according to the relatives. “Towards the end of the incident, he was telling the officer ‘Let me go, I can’t breathe,” Parrish said they had recalled.

The attorney, who is a former law enforcement officer, said Harrington appeared to have used excessive force. “Officers typically have Tasers, they have pepper spray – there are lots of different non-lethal ways to subdue somebody,” he said. “And one way, of course, is to walk away and come back with more officers.”

Friends and relatives of Sanders have embarked on a campaign demanding “Justice for Jonathan”, displaying a flyer that shows Sanders riding a horse on social media accounts. A community horse ride is being planned as a tribute.



“Please continue praying for me and my family as we so desperately need,” his mother, Frances Sanders, said in a post to Facebook.

Street has asked the Mississippi bureau of investigation (MBI) to look into the incident. He declined to specify why Harrington stopped Sanders. “But there’s no lighting on a horse carriage, and at 10.30 at night that’s ... well I can’t discuss that further,” he said in a telephone interview.

Warren Strain, a spokesman for the MBI, said in an email that state investigators and forensic technicians attended the scene. “Since the investigation is ongoing there is little we can say at this point,” said Strain.

Parrish said Sanders’s family insisted his buggy did have lights. Witnesses said the officer first stopped a man in a car who had just driven up beside Sanders’s buggy, according to Parrish. He then let this man go and pursued Sanders instead.

“He was asking ‘Why do you stop me? What are you hassling me for?’,” Parrish said the witnesses had recounted. “He pulled him off the buggy, and they went to the ground, and it went from there.”

The police chief said Sanders had no active warrants against him and that Harrington did not know who he was when the confrontation took place.

Parrish said he was already representing Sanders because the 39-year-old was out on bond for a charge of possessing a small amount of cocaine earlier this year. The attorney said Sanders appeared relatively fit and healthy.

Both Harrington and a medic gave CPR to Sanders, according to Street, before he was taken to a hospital in an ambulance. His body has been transferred to Jackson, about 100 miles to the west, for a full autopsy, according to authorities.

Asked whether the officer was injured in the encounter, Street would only say Harrington was released after being taken to hospital for a procedural checkup and drug test. Harrington has been placed on leave from work for an unspecified period, according to the chief. “With everything going on right now, we thought that was best,” he said.

Street said it was not clear whether Sanders acted aggressively. “At this point we’re not sure,” he said. “It would be premature for me to make any assumption on what Mr Sanders did or did not do.” He confirmed Sanders was unarmed.

The police chief also declined to detail where the incident happened. “All we can say is that it was within the Stonewall city limits around 10.30pm,” he said.

Stonewall is home to only 1,144 people, according to 2013 US census bureau data, which found that 77% of residents were white and 23% were black. Almost 29% of families in the town had incomes below the poverty line.

The town was established in Clarke County in the years after the American civil war and was named after General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a senior commander in the confederate army, according to the state department of archives and history.

Street said his department is composed of 10 part-time officers – nine white and one black. He said one of the white officers was a woman and the other nine officers were men. “So we’re kind of diverse,” he said.

Street said he expected that the results of the MBI’s inquiry would be put to a Clarke County grand jury for the consideration of criminal charges.



The police chief appealed people to remain calm while the inquiry was carried out. “We don’t need anything being taken out into the street,” he said. “Our community is a good community. We don’t see any issues there. We are going to continue our good relationship.”