Press investigation first look: Dying inside the jail

The officers pounded on the door of the brick house, then rang the bell several times. No answer. Their noontime presence was an unusual sight in front of the $850,000 home nestled deep inside the affluent Marlboro neighborhood.

Finally, a towering 22-year-old opened the door. Standing at 6-foot-3-inches and weighing more than 200 pounds, Amit Bornstein wanted to know why they were at his house. He was under arrest, the two Monmouth County Sheriff Officers told him. He had failed to appear in court to answer three minor charges — pot possession, stealing from cars and a traffic ticket.

Amit became agitated as his 13-year-old brother, Elad, watched from inside. Who will take care of the boy? Their mother died years earlier. Their father was in Africa on business. No one else was home. A neighbor finally agreed to take Elad in for the time being.

The cuffs clicked around Amit's wrists and he was driven away.

Six hours later, heavily bruised, cut and bleeding, Amit sat dying in the Monmouth County Jail, strapped naked to a chair inside an isolation room. A surveillance video showed him shaking, possibly from a brain seizure, then falling quiet.

At 7:31 p.m. on July 29, 2010, Amit was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

How Amit Bornstein died, why he died — even what happened inside the Freehold Township facility during the last two hours of his life — is fiercely contested.

Amit's father, Israel, claims in his wrongful death lawsuit that his son was "assaulted and battered" by corrections officers, leading to his death. The pathologist hired by the family said Amit was covered with 28 bruises and other injuries, and that he died from a lack of oxygen.

County lawyers said otherwise: Bornstein became so enraged they wouldn't let him use his cell phone that it took up to eight officers to subdue him. He died not from a beating, but from heart disease and a condition called "excited delirium," or high agitation that gave him "superhuman strength." The existence of such a condition, though, is not fully accepted within the medical community.

Read the full story, complete with videos from internal jail cameras, Sunday on APP.com and in the Sunday Asbury Park Press.