$4.05 Million From Maricopa County After a Man in Mental Health Crisis Was Restrained Face-Down and Left Unattended in a Jail Cell
After trial: This settlement resolves the claims against Maricopa County only. The City of Phoenix separately settled its own portion of the case for $800,000; the two payments involved different defendants and different conduct and should not be combined into a single figure.
Won by Ben Crump Law.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved a $4,050,000 settlement with the family of Akeem Terrell, a 31-year-old man who died in a county jail cell on New Year's Day 2021 after Phoenix police and sheriff's detention officers restrained him face-down and then left him motionless on the floor without checking on him.
What happened
On New Year's Day 2021, Phoenix police were called to a party over a report that a man would not leave. Akeem Terrell, 31, was in the middle of a mental health crisis, expressing paranoid thoughts consistent with a documented history of mental illness. Officers took him into custody and brought him to a jail intake area, where custody transferred to Maricopa County Sheriff's detention officers.
Inside a jail cell, a group of officers, Phoenix police and county detention staff together, placed Terrell face-down on the floor while changing his handcuffs. Body camera footage later obtained by his family's attorneys showed what happened next: officers held him in that prone position, applying physical pressure, until he stopped moving. When he went still, the officers got up and left the cell. Terrell lay motionless and face-down for several minutes before anyone checked on him. By the time officers returned and found he had no pulse, six minutes had passed since he had last shown signs of life.
The Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner listed the physical restraint in the prone position as a contributing factor in Terrell's death, alongside cardiac dysrhythmia, arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, extreme obesity, and the acute psychosis he was experiencing that night. Terrell weighed roughly 433 pounds and stood 6 feet 2 inches; his family's attorneys argued that combination of factors made prone restraint especially dangerous and made the delay in checking on him after he stopped moving indefensible.
Terrell's family, represented by Ben Crump Law, sued both the City of Phoenix and Maricopa County, alleging excessive force and deliberate indifference to an obvious medical need. The two governments faced separate exposure because separate personnel, city police and county detention officers, were involved in different parts of the encounter, and the case against each proceeded on its own track. The City of Phoenix settled its portion first, with its city council approving an $800,000 payment to the family. That settlement resolved the claims tied to the Phoenix police officers' conduct and is a distinct payment from the county case described here.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors handled the larger piece of the case, tied to the conduct of its detention officers and the county jail's failure to render aid once Terrell had stopped moving. After the family's attorneys pressed the county to increase an earlier settlement offer, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve $4,050,000 in November 2024. Combined with the City of Phoenix payment, the family's total recovery across both governments reached roughly $4.85 million.
Ben Crump has pointed to Terrell's death as part of a pattern in Phoenix's jail and policing practices; a U.S. Department of Justice investigation released around the same period detailed broader findings about the Phoenix Police Department's use of force. No officer involved in Terrell's death is known to have faced formal discipline.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.KOLD News 13: report on the Maricopa County settlement, naming the amount and describing the in-custody death
- 2.12News (KPNX): detailed account of the restraint, the medical examiner's findings, and the settlement vote
- 3.12News (KPNX): coverage of the separate $800,000 City of Phoenix settlement over the same death
- 4.NewsOne: report on the underlying lawsuit filed by Ben Crump Law naming excessive force and deliberate indifference claims
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