Yankton Sioux Tribe decries 'excessive force' against elder by Wagner Police Department

The Attorney General’s Office is investigating an incident outside a Wagner nursing home after an excessive force claim from the family of a Yankton Sioux Tribal member who had rushed there to see his dying mother.

The tribe’s elected government released a statement Tuesday condemning the use of physical force and a Taser to subdue 64-year-old Ray Cournoyer Sr. early Sunday morning, a tribal elder whose family posted graphic photos of the incident’s aftermath on Facebook.

The tribe’s release says Eli Kuhlman, a recently hired and uncertified officer with the Wagner Police Department, forced the U.S. Army veteran to the ground after he had told them he needed to see his mother, who died that morning.

The photos from his daughter’s Facebook post, which has been shared 7,000 times on Facebook, “show the physical aftermath of Officer Kuhlman’s use of force upon Mr. Cournoyer.”

“While there are still many unknowns, the pictures speak for themselves. It is unacceptable for anyone, much less an elder, to be deprived of their rights at the hand of law enforcement, and be treated with such force that they are bloodied, bruised and injured,” said Yankton Sioux Tribal Chairman Robert Flying Hawk.

The Wagner Police Department referred questions to the city attorney, who said he had yet to see any reports on the incident.

Ken Cotton, the city attorney, confirmed that Kuhlman had been with the six-person department less than a year and that he’d yet to be certified. Officers have a year after their hire date to complete law enforcement certification.

Cotton also confirmed that Wagner Police Chief Tim Simonsen had requested that the incident be looked at by the state Division of Criminal Investigation.

Highway Patrol spokesman Tony Mangan said only a trooper tried to make a traffic stop on Cournoyer, and referred questions about charges to the Charles Mix County State’s Attorney, Steve Cotton.

Later Tuesday, the highway patrol released the following statement:

"The South Dakota Highway Patrol has reviewed the actions of our trooper during this incident and the troopers actions were professional and within SDHP policy. The SDHP did not request the DCI investigation, but we have and will continue to fully cooperate with it."

State’s Attorney Cotton did not return a call for comment Tuesday. DCI spokeswoman Sara Rabern confirmed that the agency was investigating.

Cournoyer said he was in shock and did not pull over for the trooper as he rushed to the Good Samaritan Center in Wagner just after midnight Sunday morning to see his 87-year-old mother.

He had spent most of the day with her and consulted with a Hospice nurse, but said she had been doing well and that he left at about 7 p.m. Saturday evening to return home to his family.

He wasn’t expecting to get a call from his sister telling him that he had better hurry to Wagner to say his goodbyes.

“He said ‘mom’s going on to the spirit world, so I figured I had to get in there as fast as I could,” he said Tuesday.

The highway patrol officer who’d attempted to pull him over on Highway 46/50 called for backup, and the Wagner officer was on scene when Cournoyer got out of the vehicle.

“I hollered, ‘I’m going to see my mother, she’s dying,’ then ‘boom,’ all of the sudden they hit me,” Cournoyer said.

Cournoyer was taken to a hospital that evening for treatment and was unable to see his mother.

One of his daughters, Philomena Cournoyer, said in her public Facebook post that she witnessed the incident unfold from the parking lot.

“He was not trying to run, he was simply trying to walk into the hospital and see his mother … If that was my mother in the hospital I would have done the same thing my father did,” she wrote.

She also wrote that she had to remove the Taser prongs from her father herself while police tried to “figure out what to charge him with” because the police officer “didn’t know how to remove them.”

Philomena Cournoyer asked that the post be shared and said her family was seeking legal representation.

She is a trained emergency medical technician who had aimed to become a tribal police officer herself, according to her sister, Chiara Cournoyer of Sioux City.

Chiara Cournoyer said her entire family is in shock, both from the loss of their grandmother and their father’s trip to the hospital on the night of her death.

Detectives with the Division of Criminal Investigation were questioning her father this week about the use of force incident as the family planned a funeral for their mother.

“This is very hard on our family right now, Chiara Cournoyer said.

Her father was born and raised in the Wagner area, was 30 years free of drugs and alcohol and is a respected member of the community, she said.

Given his diabetic condition and previous injuries, she said, the treatment could have made for dual tragedies.

“We could have lost our father and our grandmother that night,” she said.

The Cournoyers feel that race is a factor in the officer’s response, and that a 64-year-old white man behaving in a similar fashion would have been treated differently.

Chairman Flying Hawk’s statement contains a request for community mediation following the incident.

“We do not know if there is room to have a respectful discussion about the incident but we must try. Therefore, we have invited the City of Wagner’s Mayor, City Council, and Chief of Police to meet so that we can exchange information, opinions and ideas on ways our communities can address this incident and move forward,” he said. “We hope they take us up on the offer.”