By MITCH WEISS and KRISTIN M. HALL (Associated Press)
BRISTOL, Tenn. (AP) — Karen Goodwin felt her son’s presence most strongly in the den: His ashes were on the coffee table, inside a clock that showed the time he died.
While Goodwin cleaned the room, she often talked to her son, which helped keep his spirit alive. She'd talk about his nephews and nieces getting school supplies or the latest from the Bristol Motor Speedway and her motorcycle ride along Highway 421, one of the most scenic routes in the state.
“I wish you had been there,” she’d say wistfully.
Austin Hunter Turner died in 2017, on a night that Goodwin has thought about many times, trying to understand what happened. Something just didn’t make sense. There was the rush to his apartment, the panic of watching her “baby boy” struggle to breathe, and the chaos of paramedics in the kitchen. She felt helpless as she prayed for him to live.
Her emotions were conflicting and painful. There was deep shame that Turner died from a drug overdose. She also had doubts when her memory didn't match the official police story. Recently, she's felt anger and outrage. She now thinks she has been living with a lie that has tested her once strong faith in the police, paramedics, and the legal system.
Goodwin’s son is one of over 1,000 people who died over a decade after being restrained by police in ways that are not supposed to be deadly, according to an investigation by The Associated Press. an investigation by The Associated Press in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism.
Turner’s case highlights a main discovery of the AP investigation: After deadly police encounters involving Tasers, brute force, and other tactics, the justice system lacks accountability. From the police officers at the scene to their superiors, prosecutors, and medical examiners, the system protects officers from investigation. the AP investigationfinds that after fatal police encounters involving Tasers, brute force, and other tactics, the justice system lacks accountability. From the police officers at the scene to their superiors, prosecutors, and medical examiners, the system shields officers from scrutiny.
Goodwin and her family serve as examples of what can happen when police tactics go too far in such a system: The truth can be lost. Like the Goodwins, hundreds of families have been left to struggle with incorrect or incomplete stories that have changed the way the dead are viewed and affected the lives of those left behind. examples of what can happen when police tactics go too far in such a system: The truth can be lost. Like the Goodwins, hundreds of families have been left to wrestle with incorrect or incomplete narratives that have recast the lives of the dead, and re-ordered the lives of those left behind.
The terrible night
Goodwin was in bed when her phone rang. It was her son’s girlfriend, Michelle Stowers. She was frantic. Turner had just collapsed on the kitchen floor.
“He’s not moving,” Stowers cried. “I don’t think he’s breathing. What should I do?”
The mother’s heart hammered.
“Call 911. I’m on my way,” Goodwin said, her mind racing through terrible possibilities.
Was her son alive? Dead? He’d had a few seizures, but they were nothing serious.
As she sped to Turner’s apartment on that warm humid night in August 2017, Goodwin called and alerted her husband, Brian, and older son, Dustin. She also dialed her sister but could only utter: “Pray for Hunter.”
When she got there, Goodwin discovered her son struggling to breathe on the linoleum of his kitchen floor. His eyes were empty, and his body was trembling. Foam was coming out of his mouth.
The mother feared her son might die at that moment. A paramedic came, and Goodwin informed him that Turner had experienced minor seizures before.
"Hunter, this is momma," she stated, kneeling and putting an oxygen mask on his face.
The front door suddenly opened, and police officers and firefighters entered the small apartment. Medics had asked for help restraining Turner to treat him. They believed Turner was resisting.
As the room filled with voices and equipment, Goodwin stepped away, feeling relieved. She and her husband and children had always admired paramedics and police. They were heroes. And she knew they would do everything possible to save her son's life.
Then an officer yelled: "Get up off the floor!" Goodwin overheard another saying, "You're going to get tased if you keep it up."
She felt confused. Her maternal instincts kicked in. "Please," she begged them, "don't hurt him more than necessary!"
The officers were holding Turner facedown on a recliner. A few minutes later, he was strapped to a stretcher, once again facedown.
Goodwin followed them to the waiting ambulance. She looked inside: Her son seemed unconscious, with a strange sort of mask covering his head. His legs were bound.
Goodwin felt helpless. That was her son. She would give her life for him.
‘My baby needs to rest now’
Goodwin followed the ambulance to the Bristol Regional Medical Center.
After a long wait, the emergency room doctor said that "for all intents and purposes" Turner was dead. "Your son is young and strong," he said. "We're going to continue working on him for that reason."
He paused, before continuing: "We'll take you back — if you think you can handle it."
Steps away, she saw a team of doctors and nurses attempting to get Turner's heart pumping again. She gazed at her son's blank face when they used a defibrillator to try to shock him back to life.
Nothing worked.
"We can keep going," the doctor said.
Goodwin waved her hand. She needed a moment. Her son wasn't moving. He didn't respond to her voice, or the life-saving measures. When she'd touched his chest, it felt like Jell-O, because the paramedics, nurses and doctors had crushed everything in there while trying to save him. Goodwin knew what she had to do.
"That's enough," she said. "My baby needs to rest now."
As she sat in the sterile hospital waiting room, she wondered: Why her son? He's such a gentle, kind soul, Goodwin thought. Everyone loved him.
He was boyishly handsome, with light brown hair and a small goatee and chinstrap of hair along his jawline. A few inches short of 6 feet, Hunter had a strong, outdoorsy kind of look. He was outgoing, ready to chat even with strangers.
Turner had a passion for fast motorbikes and owned a maroon Suzuki SV650 that could fly along at 130 mph.
He'd hit the road with his mom and dad and buddies, racing up steep stretches of the Appalachian Mountains with hairpin turns. Sometimes, he'd turn so sharp and deep he'd scrape the knees of his jeans along the ground.
Turner, who is 23 years old, worked various jobs to help make enough money to live — recently, he was fixing up old furniture.
He said to his parents, “I still have a lot of time to mature.”
As she sat there, she felt those words echoing in her mind.
Did he take too much of a drug?
At 4 a.m., Goodwin looked up and saw her husband hurrying into the waiting room. She needed him now, more than ever.
Karen had met Brian in 1996 when he stopped to fill his tank at the gas station where she worked as a cashier. They were instantly attracted to each other. Karen was drawn to his big smile and sarcastic sense of humor, and Brian to the cashier’s sassy personality and long blonde hair. Karen and Brian were married within a year.
From the start, Karen appreciated how her husband treated her two boys from a previous marriage as his own, teaching them to hunt and fish, ride dirt bikes and motorcycles. An electrician who spent weeks on the road, he had sped the 200 miles south from West Virginia to Bristol in under three hours. Brian Goodwin, a burly tough guy who never cried, was having a hard time holding it together.
“What occurred?” he asked.
Goodwin said she didn’t know. She said she’d overheard a Bristol police officer declare that Turner had died of a drug overdose.
The parents knew their son smoked marijuana. They also knew he got high using Suboxone, a drug used to wean people off opioids. But they didn’t think either drug could lead to an overdose.
It didn’t make sense to Goodwin. Why were police saying this, she wondered. They had learned from Turner’s girlfriend that he had seemed fine when she got home from her late shift at Walmart. He hadn’t acted stoned. He had collapsed out of the blue. How could this be an overdose?
Ashes
After a memorial service, the Goodwins and two dozen of Turner’s friends honored his memory with a procession of motorcycles that climbed the sharp hills of the Appalachians. When they returned to Bristol, the group said their goodbyes. That night, Goodwin felt an emptiness in her soul. It would be a long time before she felt anything else.
Brian went back to work after a month. Keeping busy helped him deal with his grief.
But Goodwin couldn’t find an outlet. The mother tattooed her left arm with an image of her son’s thumbprint, and a clock set at 12:35. The tattoo artist had mixed traces of Turner’s ashes into the ink.
Mother and son had enjoyed a special connection. He was a daredevil, a fun-loving kid. Whenever something went wrong — like the time he hurt himself jumping off a neighbor’s porch, or crashing her car into a utility pole as he tried to teach himself to drive a stick shift — he’d run straight to her. And she was always there to say, “It’s all right, Hunter. It’s all right.”
Her son had always been there for her, too. When she had been diagnosed with cancer in 2015 and surgeons had removed one of her lungs and part of the other, her son had been the one to cheer her up.
Every morning he’d sit next to his mother on the front porch, covering her with a blanket to keep her warm. Sometimes, he’d hold his mother’s trembling hands and whisper, “I love you. You’ll be OK, Mom. You’ll be OK.”
Now, Goodwin grappled with deep questions about life. She wondered why she had fought so hard against cancer only to have her son die before her.
As time passed, she found comfort in the den, next to her son's remains. Sometimes, she would think about the period after Turner's death. When she received his autopsy report, it confirmed that he died from an overdose and aligned with the official police account — stating that officers had gone to Turner's apartment to help him, but he had been too high to cooperate. He resisted them, and ultimately, it led to his death.
During that time, she was informed by the police that they had tried to save Turner but couldn't due to the drugs and his heart condition.
A strong advocate for law enforcement, Goodwin desperately wanted to trust that the police and paramedics had acted appropriately. However, something troubled her. Sometimes, she would wake up at night and hear the police officer threatening to use his Taser.
She would remember that her son appeared to be having a seizure, and the police restrained him as he struggled to breathe. She found it difficult to reconcile those actions with what she believed to be a medical emergency.
But she just didn't trust her memory. She felt constantly conflicted — her recollection conflicting with her deep trust in the police.
And more often than not, she ended up setting aside her doubts. Why would the police fabricate the truth? She wanted to believe they had done everything possible to save her son.
The Harsh Reality
On Aug. 14, she was visited by two Associated Press reporters who offered to provide more information about her son's death. They had videos that the family had never seen.
It was not easy for Goodwin to accept their offer. She knew it would be painful to revisit the worst night of her life.
After a week of anguish, she sat at her kitchen table and gazed at a laptop before playing the videos captured by police body cameras. The house was quiet except for the sound of a wind chime.
The videos on her computer screen immediately took Goodwin back. Body cameras worn by officers Eric Keller and Kevin Frederick had recorded most of the interactions between police, paramedics, and Turner.
At times, the figures were hard to discern, but one thing was evident: From the moment police arrived, Turner was treated as a suspect resisting arrest, not as a patient in an emergency.
Goodwin watched in horror as police officers seemed to disregard the fact that they had been called to a medical emergency.
Paramedics attempted to make Turner stand up. He managed to get to his knees and briefly stand before collapsing.
Officers started shouting that Turner was resisting arrest, being aggressive, and not following their orders. However, the video appeared to show Turner having a seizure.
During a seizure, the muscles of the arms, legs, and face stiffen, then begin to jerk. The videos demonstrated that Turner was not throwing punches. He wasn't kicking.
When Keller entered the apartment, the video showed him shouting at the flailing Turner, who was pinned down in a recliner chair, 'You're going to get tased if you keep it up.'
Even though paramedics cautioned him to wait, about 10 seconds later Keller pulled the trigger. Goodwin flinched when she heard the weapon’s loud sound followed by her son’s painful cry, as electricity coursed through his body.
“You’re not going to win this battle,” another paramedic said.
Goodwin was shocked.
“Win what?” she thought. “This isn’t a contest. My son isn’t resisting. He’s dying!”
The force didn’t end there. A paramedic sprayed a sedative up Turner’s nose, but most of it ended up on the medic.
Police continued to restrain Turner — even after he was handcuffed facedown on top of the recliner. They shackled his legs.
When police transferred Turner to a gurney, they again put him facedown and strapped him in place. As blood spilled from his mouth, they covered his head with a spit hood.
Once inside the ambulance, an officer sat on Turner’s body — even though he was still on his stomach. There was no rush to get him to the hospital. Instead, the body camera showed police officers and paramedics spent six minutes recounting the “battle.”
It was only then that a paramedic noticed that Turner wasn’t breathing. Attendants removed the restraints, flipped him over, and began CPR. After about 10 minutes a paramedic walked into the frame. For a moment, he studied his colleagues who were working feverishly to revive Turner. He looked puzzled.
“What the hell happened here?” he asked. “Did we cut his damn airway off?”
They said no. As medics continued to work on Turner, the quizzical paramedic asked, “Y’all ain’t recording are you?”
The officer turned off his body camera. Goodwin’s screen suddenly went blank.
‘A damn lie’
The Goodwins were furious. The videos raised disturbing questions. So, they decided to drill down into documents –- the police reports and autopsy –- to try to find answers.
They soon became convinced the Bristol law enforcement community had lied about what had happened.
Police didn’t include any statements in their reports from Karen Goodwin and her other son, Dustin, who had been in the apartment during the encounter. The events police described were a far cry from what Goodwin and her son had seen, or what was captured by the body cameras. They had made Turner out to be a villain.
In a report, Lt. Greg Brown said the paramedics told police the young man was reaching for a knife on the kitchen counter.
“A damn lie,” Goodwin thought. She’d seen a paramedic clear the counters before police arrived.
Keller said he fired his Taser to stop Turner from fighting the medical personnel.
Goodwin knew her son was dazed from the seizures. He wasn’t fighting back. They had no reason to stun him.
Brown wrote in a report that Turner was fighting with medics when he arrived at the apartment. Goodwin was there. She saw no such thing. The body camera showed the opposite.
Using buzzwords that painted the victim as the aggressor, Brown said Turner was “combative,” “agitated,” and had “ignored commands.” Brown noted that Turner had incredible strength like those under the influence of narcotics.
Sullivan County District Attorney Barry Staubus had asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to review Turner’s death.
The investigator spoke to witnesses and gathered other information, Staubus said in an interview with AP. But after examining the TBI report and the body-camera footage, Staubus concluded that Turner passed away from a drug overdose. Nothing in the autopsy determined that the force and “restraint techniques” had caused or contributed to Turner’s death.
The Goodwins had concerns about the state’s investigation and the prosecutor’s decision to protect police from responsibility. They pointed out that state investigators never contacted two of the most important witnesses: Karen Goodwin and Dustin. The state investigator had messaged Turner’s girlfriend and a neighbor at the scene, asking if they’d talk. They agreed, but never heard back from the investigator.
They never heard from the investigator again.
Tennessee law keeps the state’s investigation files confidential, including those detailing fatal police encounters – unless the death involves a shooting. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation declined to comment on Turner’s death.
Bristol’s chief of police declined to answer questions when approached by the AP. Lt. Brown and officers Keller and Frederick did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did the paramedics involved. The Bristol Fire Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Goodwins were also puzzled by the autopsy report. Medical Examiner Eugene Scheuerman had determined Turner’s death to be an accident. He died due to “Multiple Drug Toxicity” linked to his use of the opioid in Suboxone and the psychoactive chemical in marijuana.
An analysis revealed a “therapeutic to lethal level” of Suboxone in Turner’s system. Scheuerman added that “dilated cardiomyopathy” — a condition affecting the heart’s ability to pump enough oxygen-rich blood — played a role in Turner’s death.
The autopsy report also reiterated the police version of events.
He did not mention that police officers had placed Turner facedown and applied their body weight, a tactic that has long been criticized by experts for restricting breathing.
The Goodwins wondered if the medical examiner had bothered to watch the police videos. Scheuerman has since died.
Three experts who reviewed the documents for AP regarding the incident disagreed with the autopsy findings: they said Turner did not die of a drug overdose. Instead, they said the Bristol police made critical errors that contributed to Turner’s death, including placing him facedown in a way that could restrict his breathing.
“They didn’t understand the dangers of prolonged restraint and the pressure on his back,” said Jack Ryan, a police training expert and a former police officer and administrator.
Forever midnight
Karen and Brian Goodwin said they were still trying to come to terms with the truth. They had blamed their son for his own death and had felt incredibly guilty about that. They are now convinced he didn’t die from drugs — he was killed by police force.
What hurts so much is that many people in town believe Turner died of an overdose. The parents still can hear the whispers in grocery stores and restaurants: Their boy would still be alive if he hadn’t been a drug user.
Brian expressed that they have had to endure the stigma of their son being considered foolish and hopes to reveal the truth about him.
What comes next? Legal action? Becoming activists for holding law enforcement responsible for deaths that occur during arrests, to prevent other families from experiencing their pain? They are concerned about how they will react if they get pulled over by the police. They still have a positive view of the police. But will they show respect?
Karen is concerned that time may be running out for her. Her health, weakened from battling cancer, has been declining. She is relieved to know the truth but fears she may not live long enough to act on it.
Karen, fighting back tears, stated, “My son did not cause his own death. He did not have to die … His death devastated a part of us.”
She looked at the clock on the coffee table. Despite the new information, the clock’s hands remained fixed, unmoving, stuck forever at 35 minutes past midnight.
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This story is part of an ongoing investigation conducted by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs and FRONTLINE (PBS) about Lethal Restraint. interactive story, database and the documentary, “Documenting Police Use Of Force,” premiering April 30 on PBS.
The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Contact AP’s global investigative team at [email protected] or https://www.ap.org/tips/
