One day in August that year, DFR responded to a series of grass fires along a service road in West Dallas. When they arrived, they found Kyle Vess, a mentally ill man who was staying in a nearby hotel at the time. He was lying next to a smoking patch of grass. A DFR paramedic named Brad Cox began to stomp out the grass. This was captured by a surveillance camera on a building in the area.
Then, the video cuts and Vess can be seen standing up. Vess takes a swing at Cox and tries to throw a piece of PVC pipe at him. Both appear to miss and the two then move out of the camera’s view. Eventually, Vess can be seen falling to the ground. Cox kicks him repeatedly.
Then, two Dallas police and a Dallas County Sheriff’s Department officer arrive on the scene. These moments are captured on police body worn cameras. When they get there, Cox is hovering over Vess, who is still on the ground. The officers are told that Vess just assaulted Cox. DPD called for back up to help take Vess in. That’s when Vess begins to flail on the ground. Vess begins to sit up, turns toward Cox and then is kicked in the face by the paramedic.
When Vess gets up to confront Cox, the paramedic punches him in the face. Then a DPD officer deploys her Taser, and Vess falls to the ground. The officer who tased Vess reported the kick to her sergeant, which sparked a public integrity investigation into Cox. The investigation cleared the former paramedic of any wrongdoing.
Asked if he saw anything wrong with what Cox did that day, McDade responded: “Brad had the right to defend himself and his crew. Not being there, not being present for the situation and not knowing exactly what’s going on, it’s impossible to make a determination on anything.”
Ultimately, McDade said, Cox was merely defending himself during the incident with Vess.
Cox, a trained mixed martial artist, kicked a prone Vess repeatedly in the first round of the confrontation before police arrived. He stayed close and hovered over Vess even after several police officers arrived, delivering one final kick and a solid punch to Vess' head even as officers stood near Vess. The audio from the final kick isn't clear, but Vess' attorneys and at least one police officer who reviewed the video said Cox taunted Vess, urging him to "get up again."
McDade sees the video like this: “Every time Kyle was on the ground, he kept getting back up again. So, at the point at the end where Brad kicks him, he was on the ground and at that point he started to get back up and was coming after Brad again.”
He added, “At that point, Brad is still defending himself.”"We have to have the ability to defend ourselves.” – Jim McDade, Dallas Fire Fighters Association
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Earlier this year, the Vess family filed a lawsuit against Cox for detaining Kyle and using excessive force. The city is also named in the lawsuit, claiming it protects its bad apples and doesn’t properly train employees, specifically regarding use of force and de-escalation.
“Defendant city of Dallas, however, provides no training to fire and emergency personnel on the use of force or how to de-escalate public encounters to avoid violent confrontations,” the lawsuit says. “[The] city of Dallas does know, however, that its fire and rescue personnel will be in potential physical encounters and even escalating conflict with patients on the street.”
McDade said firefighters have been shot and stabbed. He said he’s even had a gun pulled on him, but DFR still doesn’t provide use of force training or de-escalation training. McDade doesn’t think they need it, either. He said it’s the police department's job to worry about de-escalation and use of force.
That raises an obvious question: What exactly did Cox think his job was as he stood over Vess, poised to continue beating the smaller man after police arrived?
But then Cox's approach to the non-head-kicking part of his work — the part about providing medical assistance to people in crisis — appears to be unique, or at least one might hope. Consider this, from The Dallas Morning News.
By the time Cox encountered Vess, Dallas Fire-Rescue had already known about other instances of potential misconduct in the paramedic’s past.Then there's the case of Hirschell Wayne Fletcher Jr., a homeless man with schizophrenia who was robbed and violently assaulted outside of a Dallas soup kitchen in 2016. An Observer story from October recounted what happened next:
Before joining the department, he was arrested on suspicion of assault at a birthday party. Cox told a polygraph examiner during his application process that police believed he was the one who caused the assault, but he was never charged.
In three other instances after he was hired in 2002, Cox was reprimanded for refusing to provide medical treatment to patients. In one of those cases, the fire department determined he failed to properly assess and transport a patient during an emergency in February 2008. He was suspended from one shift without pay.
In August 2011, Cox received a letter of counseling for “unacceptable conduct” when he failed to ride in the back of an ambulance with a patient being rushed to a hospital, records show.
A nearby officer named George Morales called two other cops out to the scene, as well as two DFR paramedics, Cox and Kyle Clark. They laughed at Fletcher as he lay in pain on the ground. Fletcher was assumed to be drunk, charged with public intoxication and taken to the Dallas Marshal’s Office and City Detention Center. He was found unconscious in his cell the next day. He was taken to the hospital and died from the head injury.The two paramedics were later indicted on felony charges of tampering with a government document after they lied and claimed police had already taken Fletcher away before they arrived. They pleaded guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges in 2019 and were given 12 months probation and $500 fines. Four months into probation, Cox was delivering the kicks that shattered bones in Vess' face.
Fletcher's family is suing the firefighters and the city of Dallas. (Coincidentally, just this week the city agreed to pay $1 million to the family of 45-year-old Juan Segovia, who in an unrelated case died in 2019 after twice being checked out by two Dallas paramedics — Cox wasn't one of them — the Morning News reported. Segovia was intoxicated but conscious the first time paramedics encountered him and sent him on his way. Called out a second time hours later, the two paramedics found him unconscious but called police without re-examining him. Segovia was hauled to the City Detention Center. Found unresponsive in his cell the next day, he was finally brought to a hospital, where he died from the effects of blunt force trauma. The city didn't even bother to file a formal response to the Segovia family's lawsuit, the Morning News reported.)
Speaking by email, Jason Evans, a DFR spokesperson, said the department currently doesn't provide either use of force or de-escalation training to its employees.
That may change soon, though. In early 2022, Evans said, the department hopes to begin providing such training to its firefighters and other members.
He said that "due to the increasing number of violent/potentially violent encounters firefighters/paramedics are exposed to, in Dallas and all over the country, we have been working with the Dallas Police Department to provide our members formal training in de-escalation techniques."
Either way, McDade doesn’t think such training would have made a difference in the incident between Cox and Vess.
He largely blames the police for everything that went wrong that day. He said they took too long to arrive at the scene and didn’t do enough when they got there. “There were police officers on scene who were doing nothing,” he said. “The real question needs to be asked: Why were the police officers not doing anything? They have a duty to act. They didn’t do a thing.”
He argued that “Dallas police failed to do their job that day because they are so understaffed. They depended on Brad to take care of that situation.”
In his eyes, if Cox assaulted Vess that day, so did the police because they tased him after the paramedic delivered the kick. (He was quick to insist that either way, no assault happened that day.)
“[The police] were controlling a situation that was very dangerous, not only to protect Brad and the crew, but also the reality was, to protect Kyle because there was traffic,” McDade said. “So, it’s not just about protecting themselves. They were also trying to protect a combative person from hurting themselves."
McDade claims Cox was justified in repeatedly kicking Vess because, he said, Vess tried to get up repeatedly and he may have had a deadly weapon. (No one has provided any evidence that Vess had such a weapon, nor have they gone beyond raising it as a hypothetical possibility.)
“He had a backpack on. What was in the backpack?” McDade said. “Were there more weapons in the backpack? Was there a potential gun in the backpack? Was there a knife in the backpack? Did Brad know that at that time? No, he did not know that at that time.”“I'm blessed to be alive." – Kyle Vess
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This is, more or less, the same justification given by Lee Allen, the DPD investigator who cleared Cox of any wrongdoing related to the incident. DPD is currently reviewing that investigation and hopes to finish in the near future.
Some of the footage from the surveillance camera that captured the first altercation between Cox and Vess is missing. The footage that has been released doesn’t show the firetruck pull up, for example. Vess claims that Cox kicked him before he ever took a swing at the paramedic. His lawyers say the rest of the video would show whether that is true. But, it’s unclear if the rest of the video still exists.
“Your option there is taking the statement of a known violent criminal with mental health issues, versus taking the statement of a 20-year veteran firefighter," McDade said. “Whose statement are you going to believe?”
Once again, Cox was on probation when he beat Vess. For lying. In an official report. Involving a case of a homeless crime victim who begged for help as Cox joined in laughing at him. Who then died from bleeding in his brain.
Indeed: Who are you going to believe?
Still, McDade maintains that DFR personnel should be able to protect themselves and that’s all Cox did in August 2019.
“We do not carry weapons. We do not have the ability to detain somebody,” McDade said. “We don’t have handcuffs. We don’t have Tasers. We don’t have any of that stuff. We have to have the ability to defend ourselves.”
Still, Vess' family and attorneys say Vess wasn’t a threat after the initial altercation, that the repeated kicks on the ground were excessive and that the former paramedic should be arrested for injury to a disabled person.
Vess suffers from a mental illness similar to schizophrenia and was still dealing with the symptoms of a prior traumatic brain injury on the day he crossed paths with Cox.
The disorder causes hallucinations. He used to manage his mental illness with medication, allowing him to do different things with his family like go scuba diving and help with welding projects. Kyle and his father Kevin, were two of the last people to weld on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge before it opened.
But Kyle’s condition worsened after he tried to kill himself in 2010. He had a few run-ins with the law after that. According to the Dallas Morning News, Vess was convicted of felony animal cruelty after his girlfriend told police he choked his pet cat. Now, the cat lives with Shelbi Madden, Kyle’s sister.
Just a few months before running into Cox, police responded to a call involving Vess at a motel in DeSoto. A caller told police that Vess had a knife and was screaming. When police arrived, Vess told them he thought people were out to him and that he’d been shot with a pellet gun.
When he allowed police into his room, they found a shotgun. Vess wasn’t allowed to have a gun because of prior charges, so he was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm.
Unlike the Segovia case, the city is trying to get Kyle Vess' lawsuit dismissed, claiming it's not liable for any harm done that day. Cox is claiming qualified immunity.
Cox left the incident with red marks on his face. Vess left with fractures in his face and cracked teeth. His family claims the ordeal exacerbated his mental illness and changed him forever. Looking back on that day, Kyle Vess says, “I'm blessed to be alive."