Published Sep. 13, 2023 10:14PM EDT
The family of former Detroit Lions cornerback Stanley Wilson Jr. on Wednesday sued Los Angeles County and its sheriff’s department, alleging that authorities have illegally resisted handing over details surrounding his death in county custody earlier this year. At a press conference, attorney John Carpenter said that authorities had ignored or pushed back on the family as they repeatedly asked for clarity on the circumstances surrounding Wilson’s death at the age of 40 on Feb. 1. Multiple attempts made over the last six months to obtain CCTV footage of the athlete’s final hours have gone nowhere, Carpenter said. “So, what is the county trying to hide here?” he asked. Wilson’s mother, D. Pulane Lucas, who also spoke at the conference, wrote in an op-ed for The Appeal last week that the “uncertainty has made the grieving process even worse than I could have imagined.” The family’s lawsuit also alleges that Wilson has not been added to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s online database of in-custody deaths, a violation of the California state penal code. “By not counting Stanley’s death, LASD is not only erasing his death and the circumstances around it from public record,” Lucas wrote. “They are also making it harder to protect other incarcerated people from suffering similar deaths—whatever the cause may be.”