Jaime Galvan is the second person known to have died at the secret interrogation site. Family and friends contend that the official autopsy and police report don’t add up

Jaime Galvan’s family made no sound on the frigid morning when they visited his grave. There were no bereaved memorials, no whispers, no audible prayers. They stood in silence, holding each other as a mix of tears and snow ran down their faces, out of respect for the father and husband they believe Chicago police killed at the Homan Square warehouse.

They come every year to Mt Olive Cemetery on the 10th of February, the anniversary of Galvan’s death and the birthday of his youngest daughter, Victoria, wiping the snow off the granite slab engraved with Jaime’s face. Celebration of Victoria’s birthday has been muted since police told the family Galvan died by drug overdose at the west side warehouse, which the Guardian has exposed as a site for incommunicado detentions and interrogations without access to legal counsel.

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It has been a decade since Galvan’s mysterious death in custody at Homan Square. His family feels frozen in time. An official autopsy report concluded that Galvan, who had been arrested for selling cocaine, had died after ingesting narcotics. Family and friends arrested alongside Galvan, backed by independent forensic evidence, tell a different story.

Galvan’s official autopsy contrasts in significant ways with an independent one the family ordered as part of a failed police brutality lawsuit. Chicago police even gave the media the wrong place of his death.

But a Guardian transparency lawsuit has revealed Galvan as the second person known to have died in police custody at Homan Square.

Internal police records show that between late 2004 and mid-2015, Chicago police detained more than 7,351 people at Homan Square, more than 6,000 of whom are black, but only permitted lawyers access 86 times. The records are still incomplete.

Many questions remain about what exactly happened to Galvan. Chicago police did not respond to a series of questions prior to publication, but Galvan’s friends are adamant that he is a rare Homan Square arrestee whose death in custody, described officially as a drug overdose, was neither self-inflicted nor an accident.

“He was killed. It was not an accident. He didn’t kill himself. They killed him. They killed him,” said Galvan’s best friend and former partner in drug dealing, Victor Alexander.

Their other partner, who requested to be cited as John Doe while he rebuilds his life post-conviction, was in a Homan Square interrogation room near Galvan’s. While Doe was unable to see inside, he told the Guardian he heard “a lot of commotion”, then “boom and banging”, and then “a gagging sound” coming from his friend’s cell. Later, he would be interviewed by a homicide detective about Galvan’s death.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jaime Galvan with his children Photograph: Courtesy of the Galvan Family

A police spokeswoman claimed Galvan died “in his sleep after interviews at Harrison Area headquarters”, the Chicago Tribune reported on 11 February 2006.

However, on the official police hospitalization case report, obtained by the Guardian through a wide-ranging transparency lawsuit begun last year, the “address of occurrence” of Galvan’s death was not Harrison area headquarters. It was 3340 W Fillmore Street – the secretive police warehouse complex otherwise known as Homan Square.

Interviews with Galvan’s friends and family paint a picture of a happy guy who also sold cocaine and drank too much beer. He was a joker and he had a smart mouth, ready to dish out trash talk. He took his kids to school each morning and picked them up after every day, including the day he was arrested.

“He was a good father, a good son, a great friend to have. Whatever he did for a living never defined him as a man or as a father or as a son. That doesn’t define a man,” said Alexander.

Their friend and dealing partner, Doe, was arrested with Galvan at the same location on 9 February 2006. Alexander was arrested at a different location. Doe said they bounced around: first to a district station on West Madison Avenue, and then to Homan Square. “We rolled to Homan together,” Doe told the Guardian.

According to Doe and Alexander, Galvan never did drugs, only sold them. Galvan also did not have drugs on him during or after the arrest, said Doe, who was the last person other than a police officer to see Galvan alive: “He did not” take any drugs with him from the stash house.

For someone caught with multiple kilos of cocaine, Galvan was in stable mental and emotional condition, his friends said, perhaps owing to having a lawyer at the ready from his prior arrests. “He was good. He was OK” mentally, Doe said.

Police at Homan Square separated Doe and Galvan; according to the Cook County coroner’s report, Galvan was taken to the second floor. Doe was neither booked nor fingerprinted nor permitted a phone call – standard behavior for Homan Square arrestees – and was handcuffed to a wall “for hours”, he said. He said he could hear Galvan in the next interrogation room but couldn’t see him. And what Doe heard, “somewhere between 10, 11, maybe 12” at night, sounded like struggling.

“I heard a holler,” he said. “I heard officers talking to him … After that I just heard a lot of commotion, like boom, boom, boom, boom, and banging, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I didn’t hear nothing else after that. My door was kind of cracked, then they shut it after that, they shut my door all the way.”

I just heard a lot of commotion, like boom, boom, boom, and banging … and then I didn’t hear nothing else after that John Doe

Before the police shut the door, Doe said, “I heard a gagging sound, like [makes choking sound], like choking, like somebody was choking after the commotion, like choking.” Doe said he heard “nothing” about getting help, but “I could see, under my door, like, people running back and forth in and out of that room.”

Doe couldn’t hear Galvan specifically yelling but heard a mix of voices: “At first it was yelling. Then it sounded physical. After the yelling, then I heard the banging.”

Doe said he had already refused to talk to police, demanding his lawyer. An officer told him: “Oh, you gonna talk when I come back.” But the interrogator never returned. The next officer Doe spoke with at Homan Square “was homicide police, telling me about my friend”. Doe told them what he heard but wasn’t able to see Galvan’s body: “When they rolled him out, I could hear all that.”

The police report about Galvan’s death, a handwritten account, is not written by an officer who had any first-hand contact with Galvan. It relates instead what officers, whose names are blacked out in the documents provided to the Guardian, said: “He discovered victim unresponsive in holding cell at 2358 hrs at which time he contacted EMS. Victim pronounced Dead at 0145 hrs. … Last physical contact with victim prior to discovery was by PO [name redacted] at 2047 hrs on 09 Feb 06. … Victim was also observed snoring in holding cell by Sgt. [name redacted] at 2330 hrs.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The police report about Galvan’s death. Photograph: Chicago Police Department

Another description, from the Cook County medical examiner’s report, reads that Galvan was “observed lying on a bench … face up, with his left wrist cuffed to a horizontal bar. Cursory examination revealed that the subject was warm to the touch with slight rigor. There were no obvious signs of trauma noted to the subject. [An officer] observed a white powdery substance on the floor underneath the subject.”

Although the police report says a representative of the police department’s news affairs division was notified, a police spokeswoman misidentified Galvan’s place of death to the Chicago media as “Harrison area headquarters”.

A Cook County medical examiner’s report, acquired by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act, claimed that Galvan, 33, died of “opiate intoxication”. However, the hospitalization case report contains a box about the “sobriety of victim”. In Galvan’s case, the box is marked “sober”. Cocaine, the drug Galvan sold, is not an opiate.

Nor does the report’s documentation of Galvan’s personal effects mention that he was taken into custody with any drugs on him. The medical examiner’s report notes that police observed Galvan throwing a backpack full of “5 bags suspected cocaine” out of a car window. Files for thousands of Homan Square arrests the Guardian lawsuit has acquired frequently specify the presence of drugs on someone at arrest.

Galvan’s wife at the time of his death, Yadira Galvan, claimed his body at the hospital and immediately called his ex-wife and mother of his children, Elizabeth Galvan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jaime Galvan on his wedding day. Photograph: Courtesy of the Galvan Family

“She called me while she was in there,” Elizabeth Galvansaid. “Saying, ‘he has bruises all over his face, his lips are busted, his neck is all red’.”

The family say police showed Yadira photos of Galvan handcuffed to a wall with his shoes off. A white powder, which looked like cocaine, was coming out of his rectum and nose. The family recalls that officers said his death was due to a suicide by overdose, which was never mentioned by police in the initial media report. The Cook County medical examiner’s death certificate said the death was not a suicide, but an “accident”.

In the police’s documented version of events, Galvan was handcuffed to the wall, fell asleep to the point of snoring, and died of an overdose. The official Cook County autopsy found morphine in Galvan’s system. A police submission to the unsuccessful brutality lawsuit filed by Galvan’s family says the powdery substance found in his cell was heroin, a drug he did not sell and friends say he did not ingest. It remains unclear how Galvan would have gotten the heroin into his Homan Square cell.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Cook County toxicology report on Galvan found negative traces of cocaine but positive traces of morphine, a drug he did not sell and friends said he did not touch. Photograph: Cook County Office of the Medical Examiner

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Cook County autopsy report suggesting Galvan overdosed. Photograph: Cook County Office of the Medical Examiner

“It made no sense,” Elizabeth remembered thinking. “How could he do all that?” Elizabeth’s suspicions prompted her to seek an alternative autopsy. She obtained it in Nebraska.

“In view of the findings at autopsy and the police investigation, the cause of death in this Hispanic male, Jaime Galvan, is asphyxia resulting in sudden death,” wrote the examining doctor, Matthias I Okoye, director of Nebraska forensic medical services, who also considered Galvan’s death an “accident”. Though his friends and family provide unequivocal insistence that Galvan did not do drugs, Okoye found evidence of “morphine intoxication” in his system.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Independent autopsy listing death by asphyxia. Photograph: Nebraska Forensic Medical Services

The Nebraska autopsy found the asphyxiation was associated with a “group of six (6) recent red linear abrasions of left side of the neck”. Additionally, “minor blunt force trauma” was apparent on Galvan’s head at his scalp, left upper eyelid, cheek, and left side of his face; on his right interior abdomen; and on his right arm, right elbow, right forearm, and left wrist.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office did not note any of that, with the exception of verifying the left-wrist abrasions, “consistent with handcuff marks”, and a “reddish area over the right forehead area”. It includes nothing about the marks on Galvan’s neck. But it conspicuously mentions a “bit of clear plastic anteriorly in the intergluteal fold suggestive of containing white powder”.

According to Alexander, who was also detained at Homan Square but not contemporaneously with Doe and Galvan, it made no sense for Galvan to ingest the drugs as a way of hiding evidence. “We got caught with a lot of stuff. He got caught with five kilos … But common sense: if you get caught with five kilos, why would you swallow an eight-ball?”

The Guardian consulted an independent expert, Stuart Gitlow, a doctor and executive director of the Annenberg physician training program in addictive disease, to evaluate the two autopsies.

“Cause of death in narcotic overdoses is always due to respiratory failure, not the overdose itself,” Gitlow said.

“It’s kind of like saying somebody died from smoking,” he continued. “Nobody dies from smoking, they die from failure of some physiological process secondary to damage caused by smoking for many years.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jaime Galvan Photograph: Courtesy of the Galvan Family

The narcotics specialist explained that the reasons why some pathologists may use “asphyxiation” or “overdose” interchangeably is primarily an epidemiological concern. Most are encouraged to explicitly list “opiates” in cases like Galvan’s.

But the discrepancies between Cook County’s autopsy and Okoye’s raised questions for Gitlow – particularly due to the county’s lack of mention of bruising on Galvan’s face, bruising on his larynx and abrasions on his neck, all of which the Nebraska autopsy found.

Gitlow said it was “atypical” for an autopsy to exclude such present data. He also described as “atypical” the Cook County autopsy’s explicit declaration that Galvan’s larynx was “unremarkable” and Galvan’s “neck is free of any trauma” – while the independent autopsy, days later, found otherwise.

Gitlow said it was possible that bruises visible on Galvan’s body in the second autopsy may have not been apparent during his initial autopsy four days earlier, which took place hours after expiration.

“It’s interesting in that one [Cook County] report says asphyxia resulting in sudden death,” Gitlow said. “Obviously, asphyxia could also be a result from a stranglehold.”

He continued: “Somebody who is held in a neck hold of some sort – who is already on the edge of not breathing particularly well due to narcotics being present – are at higher risk of death.”

As Galvan’s family prepared for the 10th anniversary of his deathin February, they decided to do something different. After arriving home from his gravesite, they went to dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse in downtown Chicago. Victoria, who will be attending college soon, got a birthday cake. It had 18 candles on it.

As they take small steps to reimagine a day Elizabeth Galvan says was always “supposed to be happy”, they cannot seem to shake the pain from Jaime Galvan’s death. . Even as they gather to celebrate his life, they believe their father and husband would be there with them if he had never been taken to Homan Square.

“[I’ve] hated the police, I’m not gonna lie,” Elizabeth Galvan said. “Any time I heard anything on the news I was like, yeah, right: they are lying, they cover up, that’s what they are known for, they do a lot of cover-ups.”

She continued: “Getting older, I see a lot of stuff now coming out; it’s not a surprise for me. I lived it. I am still living it … [and] I still mourn my husband.”