Jonathan Sanders and his mother, Frances Sanders. (Family photo)

Jon Swaine, THE GUARDIAN

 
STONEWALL, Miss. (The Guardian) — State officials in Mississippi are investigating the death of an unarmed black man who was killed in a physical struggle with a police officer while saying “I can’t breathe”, according to his attorney.

Jonathan Sanders suffered “some kind of asphyxiation” during an altercation with white officer Kevin Harrington on Wednesday night, in the small town of Stonewall, in the eastern part of the state, said the attorney, J. Stewart Parrish.

Sanders, 39, was a father of two children including a one-year-old, according to his family.

Parrish told several local media outlets that Harrington pulled Sanders from a horse and choked him to death with a flashlight. Parrish told the Guardian on Friday that allegation had come from relatives who live beside the site of the struggle and witnessed it.

But Stonewall police chief Michael Street denied the details of the attorney’s allegations, telling the Guardian the two men engaged in “a fight” without weapons after Sanders voluntarily stepped down from a horse-drawn buggy.

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