Attorneys for a local man say he was hospitalized for more than a month with third-degree burns after Phoenix police officers pinned him to hot asphalt in July.
The incident occurred weeks after the U.S. Justice Department delivered blistering findings in a years-long civil rights investigation of the city and its Police Department.
Video shows Michael Kenyon being stopped by Phoenix police and made to sit on a truck bumper. When Kenyon tries to leave, officers force him to the ground.
Later video shows burn scars on Kenyon’s chest, arms and legs. Attorney Steve Benedetto said his client had been on his way to buy sodas and take his nephew swimming.
“They literally cooked him. He was on the pavement for four minutes in 114 degree heat. The pavement was probably somewhere in the range of 180 to 200 degrees,” Benedetto said.
Phoenix police say officers detained Kenyon because he looked like a suspect in a reported theft in-progress.
They later concluded Kenyon wasn’t the suspect, but found he had a separate felony warrant.
The incident has been under internal investigation since days after it occurred.
Benedetto said Kenyon is at least the third person in the last five years to be pinned on the ground by Phoenix police during summer.
“This seems to be an institutional training failure. Or more likely, an institutional culture where it is acceptable to punish people by cooking them alive,” Benedetto said.
Surveillance video showed Kenyon walking in the parking lot and getting stopped and questioned by officers, who tried to detain him. Police say Kenyon was taken to the ground by officers after a struggle.
“This young man was burned to the third degree because his skin was cooked on asphalt,” said Bobby DiCello, one of Kenyon’s attorneys.
Scores of people are hospitalized with surface burns every summer in Phoenix, where sizzling sidewalks pose a painful danger to people as air temperatures soar into the triple digits.
Young children, older adults and homeless people are especially at risk for contact burns, which can occur within seconds when skin touches a surface of 180 degrees. Contact burns typically occur by accident, often when a person trips and falls, or suffers heat stroke and collapses on the pavement.
This isn’t the first time a person has alleged to have suffered burns when being detained on hot pavement by Phoenix police officers.
A 2020 lawsuit alleged a 17-year-old girl suffered second-degree burns on her arms when Phoenix police officers pinned her on a sidewalk on a day when temperatures reached 113 degrees.
The suit alleged the teen’s skin peeled off her body when officers removed her from the sidewalk, an allegation denied in court papers by lawyers representing the police department. The lawsuit was dismissed in April 2022.
This year, the Phoenix Police Department was accused by the U.S. Justice Department of discriminating against Black, Latino and Native American people, unlawfully detaining homeless people and using excessive force, including unjustified deadly force.
The city has said it is committed to reforms in its police department but has resisted efforts to enter a consent decree with the Justice Department.
Earlier this month, Phoenix police officers were criticized after video footage was broadcast of officers repeatedly punching and shocking a deaf Black man with a Taser during an Aug. 19 encounter in a parking lot. Resisting arrest and aggravated assault charges filed against the man were later dismissed.
