As Jermaine Covington was being arrested June 22 after allegedly fleeing an accident, eluding police and attempting a carjacking, he said he wanted to die and asked police to shoot him, according to police reports. The attorney for his wife said Covington was apparently upset that he had crashed her BMW.

If the Hillside Township officers were worried that Covington’s comments meant he was an imminent suicide risk, they didn’t mention those concerns or any steps they took to address them in several reports about the incident. If they thought the 41-year-old Maryland man wasn’t serious about wanting to die, they were wrong.

“He was cuffed with his right hand onto a bar in the processing room and he dropped a cup of coffee or water on the floor. A police officer went over and picked the cup off the floor,” Eldridge Hawkins, attorney for Covington’s widow, said in an interview last month. “Mr. Covington reached out with his left hand and pulled the gun out of the holster and shot himself dead.”

Hawkins said he knows that is what happened because he watched video of the incident, captured by the police station’s recording system, in a meeting at the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. But his client, Nyisha Lassiter-Covington, said she walked out of the meeting before the video was played. Although her husband has had previous mental health issues, she does not believe he killed himself.

What happened to Jermaine Covington has been a bizarre and confounding story since Day One. Over the last six months, authorities stayed tight-lipped about how a man in custody could have killed himself and what could have been done to prevent it. The prosecutor’s office declined to confirm Hawkins' description of what happened.

Covington’s widow said she and her attorney cannot get basic reports about the arrest, let alone her husband’s possessions, as Hillside police say the ongoing investigation prevents their release. Both Hawkins and Lassiter-Covington said they had been told by authorities that the police pursuit of Covington began because officers believed he had carjacked the BMW, but police reports later obtained by NJ Advance Media contradict that.

Hawkins said he doesn’t want to file a wrongful death suit without the basic information, but he will have to if authorities continue to stonewall him.

Changes made

What is clear is that the Hillside Police Department didn’t waste much time in making changes to prevent future shootings in the processing area.

Police Chief Vincent Ricciardi declined to comment but department policies obtained through a records request show that a big change went into effect 11 days after Covington’s death. Officers must now lock their guns in secure cabinets before going in any area of the department where arrestees are being held, while before that was only the case in the department’s cell area.

“No firearms are allowed in the report room, processing room, or cell block area at any point in time while a detainee is present. There shall be no exceptions,” the new policy states. It also says that a shift commander should be notified immediately if a detainee makes any suicidal statements.

Jermaine Covington, left, with his son, Nijee Covington, in this undated family photo. (Provided)

The Union County Prosecutor’s Office said Friday that it completed an investigation into what happened June 22, but cannot release the findings due to internal affairs rules. “However, the investigation did not reveal information that any Hillside Police Department representative committed any act of criminality,” the office said in a statement.

The prosecutor’s office and Union Township police did release some reports, 911 calls and dispatch recordings to NJ Advance Media last week in response to public records requests. They reveal details about the alleged chase and crash that led to Covington’s arrest.

For Lassiter-Covington, the information just raises more questions. She said police have not been forthcoming with her from the beginning. When they told her that her husband died, she said police wouldn’t explain how. It makes it hard to trust anything they say, she said.

“I’m not getting closure. Nobody cares. He’s just another black man,” she said. She said the loss is especially hard for their son, Nijee Covington, who turned 14 in December.

“My heart breaks for him because there’s nothing I can do to bring this man back,” she said as she fought back tears. “This just hurts so bad.”

Adding to her distress was her belief that her husband’s body had been cremated without her consent, because his death certificate said so. She said Plinton Curry Funeral Home agreed to preserve the body in case further investigation was needed, but since then the funeral home has not returned her calls or allowed her lawyer to see the body.

Funeral director Ronald Curry said the body is still being preserved in refrigeration, and cremation is listed on the document because that is the family’s ultimate plan for the body. He said he does not understand why the attorney needs to see the body because he is not a pathologist and the family has the medical examiner’s report. Curry also said he agreed to take the body from another funeral home to help Lassister-Covington, but it has been half a year and he has not been paid for most of his work.

Why was he arrested?

Lassiter-Covington said her husband grew up in Newark and got pulled into the street life. He was convicted of selling drugs in 1994 and 2003 and was injured in a shooting. But he turned his life around when they moved to Maryland in 2004, she said.

“I know he had a record before but I took Jermaine out of New Jersey to give him a better life,” she said. He became a landscaper, despite injuries to his hip and left arm. “That man worked every day.”

That’s why, she said, it’s hard for her to believe that her husband was trying to carjack people in Hillside on June 22, as police have said.

The only reason he was in New Jersey, she said, was to pick her up from Newark Liberty International Airport. Though they lived in Baltimore, she had flown out of Newark when she went on a trip to the Dominican Republic with friends. She waited at the airport for him to pick her up that afternoon, but he was already dead.

Hours earlier, around 1:30 p.m, police had received reports of a man in a black or blue BMW who struck a car and was driving on the wrong side of the road on Stuyvesant and Roosevelt avenues in Union Township, according to reports and dispatch recordings. Township Officer David Popick wrote in a report that he pursued the vehicle, but eventually called off the high-speed chase. He said he later learned that two officers on Stuyvesant Avenue had nearly been rammed by the same BMW as it drove on the sidewalk.

The next 911 call came in at 1:46 p.m. A man said he saw the BMW with Maryland plates crash into a telephone pole on Route 22 in Hillside and saw the driver run away, holding a gun. Police searched but couldn’t find him.

An excerpt of police reports about the arrest of Jermaine Covington June 22, 2018. (UCPO)

Then, at 3:40 p.m., Hillside officers radioed that they had seen the man try unsuccessfully to carjack a vehicle at a carwash. They chased and arrested him as he was trying to kick in the door to a building on Leo Street, the report said. Police said they did not recover a gun from Covington or at the site.

“At the scene he was uncooperative and yelling he wanted to die,” Popick’s report said.

Hillside Township Officer Natalie Ogonowski noted in her report that as Covington walked toward the cruiser he repeated, “Why didn’t he shoot me? He should have shot me.”

Questions remain

Authorities redacted parts of the records that dealt with Covington’s death, but the dispatch logs and Covington’s death certificate show he was at the station for 26 minutes before he shot himself in the head at 4:46 p.m., per the medical examiner’s office. He was pronounced dead by a medical professional 31 minutes later.

The dispatch logs show police called the prosecutor’s office, Chief Ricciardi and EMS at 4:49 p.m. Fifty minutes later, five Hillside officers were taken to Newark Beth Israel Hospital to be “checked,” the logs say.

Meanwhile, Lassiter-Covington was at the airport, worried because her husband didn’t answer his phone or pick her up. She went to her brother’s house, where police contacted her to verify the BMW was hers and asked her to come into the station. They eventually told her Covington had killed himself, but they wouldn’t say how. She said they asked whether he had mental health issues, and she confirmed that he was bipolar and saw a therapist.

She said she eventually guessed out loud that he had shot himself with one of their guns. No one would confirm it, but she read it in the news the following day. They wouldn’t let her see his body, she said.

Lassiter-Covington said she doubts that her husband killed himself partly because he had limited use of his left arm from an old injury, and that was the hand he supposedly used to grab the gun. She thinks he was actually beaten to death, despite what police and the medical examiner said. When she saw her husband’s body and took photographs at the funeral home, skin was missing from a large part of his forehead. But, she said, she never saw a gunshot wound.

While she and her lawyer disagree on how he was killed, they both agree that Covington should not have died and that the Hillside Police Department should have to answer for what happened.

“He didn’t deserve to die. He was just scared,” she said.

Hawkins said a civil complaint is in the works, and he hopes the formal discovery process will mean more answers for Lassiter-Covington and her son, who are in mourning.

“My client is extremely in grief because no one will answer,” he said.

The Union County Prosecutor’s Office issued the following statement Jan. 9: “We extend our deepest sympathies to the friends, family, and loved ones of Mr. Covington – it is out of respect for them that we have repeatedly declined to publicly comment on the circumstances of his death and even redacted portions of publicly released documents that referred to it. However, according to every available and applicable piece of evidence, including video footage, any allegation that any other person deliberately contributed to or caused his death is objectively and demonstrably false.”

Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccajeverett. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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