Freddie Gray is not alone: 1997 case raised same issue with Baltimore Police

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Like Freddie Gray, Jeffrey Adrian Alston ended up with a broken neck after being stopped by Baltimore Police.

Shannise Boyd felt a shiver the moment she saw Freddie Gray’s picture on the news last week. Tubes and wires protruded from Gray’s 25-year-old body as he clung to life in a Baltimore hospital bed. Days before, he suffered a severed spinal cord while in police custody, an incident that remains under investigation. He died on Sunday, April 19.

For Boyd, the scene and circumstances surrounding Gray’s injury were strikingly familiar. Nearly 20 years before, Jeffrey Adrian Alston–with whom Boyd had a daughter–wound up with a broken neck during an encounter with the Baltimore police, leaving him a quadriplegic.

“It was absolutely chilling,” says Boyd, a 40-year-old physician’s assistant. “It was exactly the same. I remember the whole thing like it was yesterday.”

As the investigation into what exactly happened to Gray widens, other Baltimore cases have started to surface, raising deeper questions about police conduct and their characterization of these incidents. Several publications reported this week that in 2005 another Baltimore man, Dondi Johnson, suffered a fatal spinal injury after being placed in a police van.