The family of a man who died after a 2021 traffic stop is suing the Richmond County sheriff and four deputies involved in the incident.
Jermaine Jones, 24, lost consciousness after his Oct. 11, 2021, arrest near Aquinas High School and never woke up.
He was tased and beaten in the head during the incident, sustaining a concussion for which deputies delayed medical care, the suit contends.
Letayia Anderson, the mother of Jermaine Jones’ child, and Jones’ mother, Keyana Gaines, filed the lawsuit Oct. 11, 2023, in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia.
Jones’ death led to the brief suspension of seven Richmond County Sheriff’s deputies while the Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted an investigation.
Augusta District Attorney Jared Williams cleared the deputies last year after the GBI and medical examiner reports found Jones’ exact cause of death to be undetermined.
Walden Drive connects Aquinas to Magnolia Park apartments, where deputies that evening were conducting a meth-buying sting using a confidential informant, the suit contends.
But after losing track of a suspect, it said, they turned their attention to a dark SUV being driven through the area by Jones’ cousin.
Jermaine Jones Sr. was in the front passenger seat and his son, Jermaine Jones Jr. was in the back.
With a “hunch” the suspect was in the SUV, the deputies pulled the car over, saying a license plate cover obscured the plate, the suit contends.
The three men were patted down and ordered to sit on a curb.
After sitting for about 20 minutes without being detained, Jones Jr. told his father he was leaving.
Deputy Leslie Gaiter “deduced he was getting ready to run,” the suit said.
As Jones got up, Deputy Richard Russell shot Jones with a stun gun, just as 220-pound Gaiter tackled 150-pound Jones to the ground, it said.
Filed by attorney John Batson, the suit names as defendants only four of the seven deputies associated with the incident – Gaiter, Russell, Christopher Brown and John Tarpley – along with Sheriff Richard Roundtree.
With Jones’ head pressed to the pavement, Gaiter “hit plaintiff in the head with his fist, or the heel of his hand,” at least three times, the suit said.
A half-hour after deputies stopped the SUV, they would transport Jones not to a hospital, but eight miles south to the Richmond County jail.
In the jail parking lot, Gaiter determined Jones was unresponsive and drove him to the hospital.
There, “a CT scan of his head was done and Mr. Jones was rushed into emergency brain surgery” and would end up having two emergency brain surgeries in 12 hours, according to the lawsuit.
He never regained consciousness, and family members agreed to remove him from life support on Oct. 18, 2021.
The plaintiffs say experts will testify that Jones’ brain injuries resulted “from much more than a single fall to the ground from being tased.”
Hemorrhaging and swelling in three distinct areas of his brain suggests “multiple blows at different locations,” the case states.
Deputies cleared of wrongdoing
Official GBI findings released in December 2021 were that Jones fell and hit his head on the ground after Russell shot him with the taser.
The autopsy showed multiple hemorrhages on his brain, but they were only observed after he’d had surgeries on the left and right sides.
The lawsuit contends the men were profiled, stopped and the process delayed because they were Black. Never detained and not handcuffed, Jones got up to leave after about 20 minutes.
Deputies ignored the seriousness of Jones’ injuries, despite Russell’s training as an EMT, it said.
The incident played out as it did because Roundtree condones department customs of tasing and the “punitive use of gratuitous force” on suspects who try to flee, it said.
Last month, the Augusta Commission agreed to settle for $75,000 a lawsuit filed against Russell, who resigned last year, by a retired school custodian.
The suit accused Russell of using excessive force while arresting her at Olmstead Homes and making the arrest without probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
In the GBI investigation of Jones’ death that preceded Williams’ decision to clear the deputies, of the four named, only Russell agreed to give a statement.
In his statement, he said Gaiter struck Jones at least three times in the head.
Jones Sr. told GBI investigators he recalled a “large Black male officer hitting Jones Jr.” three or four times in the face while Jones was on the ground.
The report says attorneys for Gaiter, Tarpley and Brown advised their clients would not be making a statement.
The local government and sheriff’s office had not responded to the filling as of Friday.
