After pepper-spraying, punching and hitting 29 year old Tyre Nichols, which resulted in his death, a now fired Memphis police officer involved in the fatal beating took a photo of Nichols and shared the photo with at least five people.
This information was revealed in documents that were made public on Tuesday as part of a Memphis Police Department request to decertify the five officers charged with the vicious assault on Nichols on January 7. The former cops can no longer work as police in any part of the state after being decertified.
The photo was sent by Demetrius Haley, one of the five officers fired on Jan. 20, according to the documents.
According to NBC, Haley was also the officer who physically forced Nichols out of his vehicle during the initial traffic stop and deployed his chemical irritant spray “directly close up to the subject’s eyes,” documents from Memphis Police’s Inspectional Services Bureau said.
He used profanity, laughed and “bragged” after Nichols was beat, according to the documents.
On his personal cellphone, he took two photographs “while standing in front of the obviously injured subject,” meaning Nichols, “after he was handcuffed,” the documents said.
Haley “admitted” to sharing at least one photo in a text message with five people: a civilian employee, two Memphis police officers and a female acquaintance, the documents said.
During the administrative investigation, a sixth person was identified as also having received the same photograph, the documents said.
Haley violated police policies including personal conduct, truthfulness, neglect of duty and excessive force/unnecessary force, according to police.
Disseminated photograph of Nichols is a violation
The dissemination of the photograph violated the department’s “Information Concerning Police Business” policy, which states “a member shall not communicate information relating to official police matters without prior approval or subpoena, except to authorized persons. A member shall treat the official business of the department as confidential,” according to the documents.
Haley joined the force in August 2020 and was previously accused of beating an inmate in Shelby County in a 2016 lawsuit.
In that case, he was accused of being one of three corrections officers who allegedly beat inmate Cordarlrius Sledge. The suit, which Sledge filed without a lawyer, was dismissed in 2018 after a judge found he had not properly served one of the defendants with a summons.
Haley was also found to be untruthful in his narrative of Nichols’ arrest, the documents said.
“In your incident summary, you wrote that you heard your partner tell the individual, ‘Let my gun go!’ before he was taken to the ground,” the statement said. “You were also heard making the same statement on body-worn camera to your partners in the presence of witness officers. However, video evidence did not support your oral or written statement and your information was deemed untruthful.”
The statement further said: “You never told the driver the purpose of the vehicle stop or that he was under arrest. Audio from a body worn camera did not capture the driver using profanity or displaying any violent threats.”
“Your on-duty conduct was unjustly, blatantly unprofessional and unbecoming for a sworn public servant,” the document said.
According to decertification documents for all the officers charged with second-degree murder — Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Tadarrius Bean, Desmond Mills Jr and Justin Smith — none of their body cameras captured the entire incident, despite policies requiring them to activate it during all police encounters.
Haley failed to activate his body camera during the first encounter with Nichols, though it was functioning properly, his documents said.
Martin took off his body camera at some point and placed it in his unmarked vehicle; Mills and Bean both at one point removed their body cameras and placed them on the trunk of a car; and Smith’s camera was not activated during his initial interaction with Nichols, the documents said.