Their dad was ‘the loudest in the room.’ They’ve quietly sought justice for his death
“No justice. No peace.”
The chants rang out across the United States as Sean Neville watched, in horror, body camera footage showing five deputies pinning his father to the floor with his arms secured behind his back and his ankles raised to his wrists.
“No racist police.”
Protesters fought for racial justice as Neville read the autopsy report verifying that his father died from being pinned to the floor of a cell, cutting off his ability to properly breathe and leading to a brain injury and heart attack.
“I can’t breathe.”
Those words, heard so often at demonstrations, described what happens when a person is held down the way Neville’s father was. His father shouted them at deputies more than 30 times.
“Say their names.”
As the protesters marched, they listed the Black individuals killed by police. But rarely did those lists include 56-year-old John Neville, who died from injuries sustained at a jail in Winston-Salem.
That was by design.
Sean Neville and his siblings have been consistent throughout their ordeal on one thing: they do not want their father’s death to result in turmoil across Forsyth County.
“The thing that we really wanted to do just as a family, to honor his memory, was conduct ourselves in a way that was dignified and graceful,” Neville said. “I would have really hated for this to become a big mess.”
The News & Observer interviewed Neville on June 28 about the long road his siblings have endured since their father was killed at the Forsyth County Detention Center.
He said a lot of his anger has subsided, and he doesn’t regret his family’s decision to seek justice quietly.
But that road has been hard.
Details of their father’s death were withheld from them for months, a grand jury failed to indict the deputies charged in his death, and Neville sees no remorse from the medical company he and his siblings are suing.
Siblings grapple with how to handle their father’s death
John Neville has two sons and a daughter, Sean, Kristopher and Brienne, but Sean Neville said he was a father-figure to many.
He was fun-loving, Neville said. The kind of person you don’t forget.
“He was always the life of the party, always the loudest in the room,” he said.
Neville believes a piece of his father lives on in himself and each of his siblings. For him, it was his passion for the food service industry.
“He always had a job in the kitchen when I was a kid, and that sort of stoked my own flame and my own passion,” Neville said, “and that’s my career, now, is food service and being able to do that at a high level.”
The three siblings leaned on each other as they learned more about their father’s death.
Brienne Neville, who worked as military police at Guantanamo Bay, was able to bring a different perspective to the case from her brothers, with knowledge of how officers are trained to handle cases like their father’s. Sean Neville said that helped them in recent years.
However, the decision to handle his death peacefully was reached together, he said, and it was unrelated to her work in law enforcement.
“As angry as this made us, what happened, it just wasn’t going to solve anything, it wasn’t going to help anything to put people in danger, or destroy things,” Neville said. “That’s not going to bring him back.”
Keeping the death quiet
It was Dec. 4, 2019, when John Neville’s children made the decision to pull their father from life support.
Sean Neville said it was his decision to keep his father’s death from the public — at least initially.
“We just wanted a moment to give everybody a chance to breathe and to grieve and understand what was going on,” Neville said.
Months went by, and the COVID-19 pandemic began, causing a slowdown in the flow of information. The family waited for the coroner’s report, hoping for information about exactly how their father died.
“We wanted to get a grip on the details and to all have a moment to deal with it before it became a public spectacle,” Neville said. “Because we knew it would be.”
More months passed. More than 1,130 miles away in Minneapolis, a 46-year-old Black man named George Floyd handed a convenience store clerk a $20 bill, and the clerk suspected it was counterfeit.
Police arrived, found Floyd sitting in a vehicle and forcibly removed him, taking him to the ground much as John Neville had been. But in the case of Floyd, officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Like John Neville, Floyd pleaded with Chauvin, telling the officer he couldn’t breathe, before dying.
Video of Floyd’s death led to protests and riots across the country as people called for racial justice in policing.
Back in North Carolina, Sean Neville and his siblings were being ushered into the Forsyth County District Attorney’s office to watch the video footage of their father’s death.
“We sort of found out about this right as the George Floyd thing happened, and it blew up, so we knew when this came to light, it was going to make some noise,” Neville said.
From the video, the family finally learned the true circumstances surrounding their father’s death.
“That was tough,” Neville said. “It’s still tough, just having to make that discovery.”
Simultaneously, the case became public, and the siblings agreed that it needed to be — or what happened would be swept under the rug.
Neville’s death becomes public
In July 2020, everything moved quickly.
The public learned about John Neville’s death after The N&O petitioned the courts to release body camera footage from the jail.
The district attorney charged five deputies and a nurse in his death.
A judge released the footage.
But then the case slowed.
Two years passed without an update from the district attorney’s office.
In April, Sean Neville learned from his attorneys that Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill would take the case to a grand jury. Normally, this process allows investigators to contend there is enough evidence to move a case forward.
The grand jury chose not to indict the five deputies.
“It was hard to hear,” Neville said. “It was very hard to hear, simply because that was really what we were working toward the entire time was making sure that those who were in that video, who did what they did, were held responsible.”
The grand jury did indict Michelle Heughins, a nurse working at the jail for the medical company, Wellpath, formerly known as Correct Care Solutions.
In the jail cell
Heughins was seen the least on the body camera footage Neville watched in spring 2020.
She was there with his father when he woke up on the floor of his jail cell surrounded by the jail’s Special Response Team.
A woman had taken out a warrant for John Neville saying he had pushed her. He missed his court date in Guilford County and was arrested on Dec. 1 in Forsyth County.
Overnight, John Neville had a medical emergency. At the time, Heughins and the other deputies believed he was having a seizure. His son believes he had an asthma attack and shot up in his bunk, then fell to the floor, causing a concussion.
In the video footage, John Neville was seen on the floor of his cell coming in and out of consciousness. Heughins performed a painful procedure called a sternum rub that woke him.
She tried to check his blood pressure, but he was combative and confused.
The Special Response Team decided to move him upstairs to solitary confinement, where they pinned him on the floor even as he continued to tell them he couldn’t breathe until he became unresponsive.
In the footage, Heughins is seen again peering through the door and telling deputies she couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
Sean Neville said his initial reaction was anger.
“I know hindsight is 20/20, but to me it was just common sense that if somebody is hurt and in need of medical attention, why wouldn’t you get it?” Neville said. “My biggest thing was when they took him to that room for observation, he’s already handcuffed, he’s already hogtied, what were you observing?”
Neville said he blames the six people involved equally, so finding out only Heughins would be indicted was difficult.
“It almost makes you feel like in the eyes of a lot of people,” Neville said, “maybe based on the nature of what happened, that your dad’s life didn’t have that much value.”
Stigma of a death in jail
Being in the public eye has taken a toll on the Neville children.
Neville said they see the looks and hear the whispers they get from some people. But others aren’t afraid to tell them what they think, and aren’t always kind.
“A gentleman stopped me to talk about the case in the grocery store, and it was crazy,” Neville said. “The first thing out of his mouth was, if he didn’t want that to happen then he shouldn’t have been in jail.”
Neville said he’s both read and been told that his father asked for his death by assaulting a woman.
He has not learned exactly what happened between the woman and his father. He’s heard differing stories, including that the incident may not have happened at all. The woman has never responded to requests for comment from The N&O.
“So many people hear pending charges and they treat it like it’s the gospel truth, and say that if he might have done it, he did it, and they insinuate because of that he’s deserving of death,” Sean Neville said. “That to me is just callous and inhumane.”
Lawsuit settlement
In June, the Neville family got its first glimmer of hope for some type of justice.
A judge accepted a settlement with a $3 million payment from Forsyth County and the sheriff’s office to the family.
“It’s a statement that this shouldn’t have happened,” Neville said. “Regardless of who’s admitting what, or admitting to what, that shows everybody that it wasn’t right.”
Neville said he has maintained a positive relationship with Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough. He said Kimbrough changed some jail policies, including banning the use of prone restraint and getting rid of Wellpath.
“There’s been positive changes and honestly I think that’s more justice than anything, even if the officers had been indicted,” Neville said.
Wellpath
The Neville family continues their fight against Heughins and Wellpath.
Heughins is still facing criminal charges for her alleged role in Neville’s death, and the family is suing both her and the company.
“I know a lot of people who were really upset that the nurse was indicted,” Neville said, “but at the same time, she had one job, one thing to do, and that was to help the person who was in distress. She did not, until he was unresponsive without a pulse.”
Neville says the more he learns about the policies and procedures of Wellpath, the more he understands why his father died under their care.
“They haven’t made a good-faith attempt to even try to reconcile the case,” Neville said. “Had they taken a look at the way their policies were administered, and their operating procedures, there is a good chance he would still be alive.”
Teresa Koeberlein, a senior vice president for Wellpath, stood by Heughins in a statement to The N&O Monday, but added that they empathize with the family “whose grief is evident in the loss of their loved one.”
“We believe the facts will show that Nurse Heughins performed her duties in line with the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place at the time,” Koeberlein said. “The video shows that when permitted to act, Nurse Heughins worked diligently and compassionately to save Mr. Neville’s life, providing the level and type of care appropriate under the circumstances presented to her.”
Wellpath, under its former name, has been at the center of numerous lawsuits around the country, and its CEO, Gerard Boyle, was sentenced in February to three years in federal prison for bribing a sheriff in Norfolk, Virginia, who in May was sentenced to 12 years in prison, WVEC reported.
Case continues
Meanwhile, Neville said O’Neill has told his attorneys he is pursuing all avenues involving the deputies’ charges.
Neville said he appreciates O’Neill making sure the siblings are kept up to date on the case.
He said he doesn’t know if justice would have looked different had they been louder, but they’ve tried to hold accountable the people and the systems responsible.
“That’s our goal,” Neville said. “Hold the people accountable, who did it, all the systems that allowed it or set things up for it to happen, accountable; and to hopefully help someone else, so the next family doesn’t have this issue or this problem.”
