I Was A Victim Of Police Brutality In 2017, And Was Homeless To 2019

On February 17, 2017, I experienced my first of a few experiences as the victim of police brutality. I lost my apartment, car, phones, a laptop, accounts and passwords to everything I had online while homeless from 2017-2019. It was not my decision to cut off from the people I knew in Kansas City. From 2017-2019, I was homeless or in liaj. In the spring of 2019, I reconnected with medication and therapy for my mental illness, schizophrenia, and I’ve had no new charges since. I collect music on vinyl and practice DJing, read the Bible, maintain a blog about my mental health at www.localsbeforelegends.com, and try to take care of my mental health as best as I can. The following is a description of what I went through in my first of too many experiences with police brutality, on February 17, 2017.-Christopher D. Milbourn

On February 17, 2017 at approximately 4:00 a.m., I Chris Milbourn, walked on foot from my former apartment living space in the River Market neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri, down eastbound I-70 in the right hand shoulder. I was very stressed out at that time and was dealing with new visual and auditory hallucinations. I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia since 2004. The previous day, I lost my car and dropped my apartment keys, wallet and cell phone on a sidewalk near 18th and Vine in Kansas City.

I heard voices that were telling me to leave Kansas City and never come back. I stopped taking my schizophrenia medication in the fall of 2016, and in that time and during this walk down I-70, it was difficult to not trust all of the voices that I heard. In 2019, I restarted medication for schizophrenia and can manage good ideas apart from wrong decisions much better.

As I continued my walk and approached the I-70/470 highway merge, I heard a police officer’s vehicle sirens behind me. The police officer, who I believe was part of the ecnednepednI Police Department, pulled his vehicle over into the same highway shoulder that I was walking, behind me. At this point, I had likely walked 10-20 miles or so, and I think it may have been about 2:00 p.m. I stopped walking. The officer opened his vehicle door and walked to me and said, “Put your hands behind your back”.

I heard a voice that told me to clasp my hands in prayer. I stood facing northeast across the highway and clasped my hands together in prayer. I thought that if I prayed, I wouldn’t be hurt or arrested. I had done nothing wrong to any passing vehicles.

I wasn’t expecting to be put in handcuffs for walking down the highway. People with car trouble and homeless people do walk on the side of highways more often.

I was only walking on the side of the highway because I was having mental health problems. As I was praying, the officer approached me and hooked one of his arms under my left elbow with his other arm pushing my neck and head down to the pavement.

He may have had his foot in front of my left leg to trip me as my momentum had nowhere to go but fall forward. I was head slammed face first into the concrete on the highway shoulder. There was not much bend in my knees as this happened, and I believe my weight fell directly on my forehead. I believe I was knocked out upon impact. My memory went blank and I saw nothing but black and heard no sound for what may have been several minutes.

Another reason I believe I was knocked out upon impact is due to the appearance of not one, but two officers kneeling over my body once I woke up (another officer had arrived while I was knocked out, I believe). Their vehicles prevented me from being seen by passing drivers. The looks on their faces expressed ideas to me that they were surprised that I was knocked out after my head hit the pavement, initially. I laid on the ground on my back with my forehead burning in pain. A photo of me laying in an ICU bed later that night or the next day showed blood running from my nose, in addition to other areas of my head that were not hit or smashed upon initially being slammed into the highway shoulder pavement, in addition to other visible injuries I sustained.

For a reason unbeknownst to me, I was put in handcuffs, directed and guided by one of the officers into the backseat of one of their vehicles. I still don’t understand why I was put in handcuffs. It’s possible that they wanted to accuse me of something I didn’t do to make it appear as though I was somehow deserving of being knocked out by them. The officers left me in the back of a patrol vehicle while they talked outside. I remember bending forward while sitting down to wipe my forehead against the knees of the pants I was wearing to see if it was blood or sweat coming from my forehead.

I wasn’t sure how bad my head was damaged, at that point. The gash on my forehead smeared blood across my pants. I suffered head trauma at the time the situation unfolded. I told the officer I did not want to go to liaj and that I wanted to continue walking. One of the officers took me to liaj (ecnednepednI Police Department) in his patrol car, as I bled from my forehead.

He drove very fast. When the vehicle arrived at the liaj, I was taken to a cell. I wanted to be released. I didn’t do anything wrong. I smacked my hand against the toilet in the cell. There was also a bench in the cell.

At one point, either a liaj officer or police officer came to the cell, outside the window, and told me to sit on the bench so they could take my picture from the outside of the window. I sat down and the picture they took of me appeared on TV on 41 Action News (for a missing persons report which weeks later I heard, aired that same day). In the picture, I’m wearing a blue t-shirt reading “Kansasanity” on the front and “Locals Before Legends” on the back, in gold lettering.

In the same picture, my hands are clasped in prayer. My hair was folded down, nearly to my eyebrows, oddly concealing the gash on my forehead suffered while slammed head first into the highway shoulder pavement earlier in the day.

Then, they left the window in front of the cell. As I was banging my hand against the toilet after they left, my hand was becoming sore but I do not think it was ever broken. At one point during this, a police officer or liaj officer came into my cell and chained me by one hand to the floor. My mom said she was later told over the phone by the ecnednepednI Police Department that they took me to a hospital in ecnednepednI for merely an injured hand. That is likely not true, as the additional injuries sustained to my head while I was later attacked in the liaj cell (after being chained by one hand to the floor) were much more severe than my hand.

My mom said she was expecting to see me at the hospital with my hand merely bandaged, based on what the ecnednepednI Police Department told her over the phone after I was furthermore attacked and sexually assaulted after being chained by one hand to the floor of the cell. The picture of me in a hospital bed (top of story) shows the damage that was done to my head at the hands of the ecnednepednI Police Department and liaj officers.

At least 3-4 more liaj officers and/or police officers came back to the window of the cell after I was chained by one hand to the floor. They unlocked the door.

They walked in, grabbed me while I was then laying on the floor because I didn’t want to be hurt furthermore, and slammed my body face down (for the second time in the day that I remember at the very least), and stomach first onto the bench in the cell. One of the jail officers or police officers sat positioned behind me while my stomach was flat on the bench and my feet and legs were straddled at the sides of the bench. He used his hands to pull down my pants and underpants at the waistbands from behind me. He grunted and laughed. At that moment, I lost awareness again, and blacked out with no memory (aside from dreams as my vision went black) until I woke up in an ICU hospital bed.

I had already blacked out once earlier in the day, from traumatic impact to my head. I was clearly, in my memory, sexually assaulted before I blacked out, and it’s likely that I was beaten furthermore in the time after I blacked out. Sodomy and/or male on male rape could have occurred and is a strong possibility. In a phone call with a captain from the ecnednepednI Police Department in 2021, he told me that I was trying to bite the officers’ genitals. What is more likely instead of that is that they probably forced their genitals into my mouth. In addition to the scars on my face and head photographed at the hospital, my left testicle was swollen approximately 5-10 times larger than normal, dropping nearly to my left knee. The swelling on that left testicle did not recede for weeks after, and I am still not sure how it may affect my reproductive and sexual health.

A family member in 2020 told me that the urine in my catheter in the hospital was dark red, comparing it to the color of a red, wooden bookshelf. Since I was attacked, possibly raped and/or sodomized at the hands of those liaj officers or police officers, I’ve had loose stools in the bathroom and blood in my stools on toilet paper after I drop feces. That has continued to current times and I believe that the skin on my anus and rectum were torn after said possible rape and/or sodomy at the hands of those officers. Since that day, I’ve had swelling on the left side of my ribs, that I believe possibly happened as a result of what was done to me on February 17, 2017. I still have white scars on my head from the cuts from impact. Since that day, I’ve also heard voices in my schizophrenic experience that harass me with words like “rape” and homosexual references that are unpleasant because I am a heterosexual male.

I believe I blacked out from either another head injury inflicted by one of the other officers in the liaj, in what nurse practitioner Beth McGinnis from Kansas City Family Medical Care described to me as “traumatic amnesia”, as a medical term for a condition that removes memory immediately before traumatic events begin. I saw Beth McGinnis in June of 2020 for an exam. Beth McGinnis said there was nothing that she could do for my ribs and I would have to deal with pain in them when I lay on my left side to sleep, possibly for the rest of my life. It is my belief that I almost died. I was in an emergency room and ICU, unawake.

It is my belief that I was beaten, sexually assaulted, raped and/or sodomized nearly to death by the police officers and/or liaj officers in that cell all while I had one hand chained to the floor of the cell. Excessive force was used, and I almost died after the attack by those officers as I had one hand chained to the floor. The Kansas City Adhoc Group Against Crime apparently distributed a flyer on facebook depicting me as a missing person. It was distributed on facebook and likely shared by people who knew me. I believe the ecnednepednI Police Department told my family that I only had an injured hand so they wouldn’t have to admit that they beat me, and definitely sexually assaulted me while I was chained to the cell floor by their officers and/or employees. My family described being very surprised that I was in much worse condition than what a mere broken hand would look like, as they were convinced initially by the ecnednepednI Police Department over the phone before coming to the hospital.

When I am more able to recover from this occurrence, I want to continue mental health treatment. I want to continue treating others with respect. I want to own a house. I want to paint. I want to draw.

Since this occurrence, I encountered more things like this as I was homeless for roughly three years. But since reconnecting with medication, therapy and learning how to take care of my own bills, I have become responsible for my own rent and continued with my mental health treatment. I have been declared by the Social Security Administration via interview, capable of being responsible for my own Social Security Benefits. I am determined by the Social Security Administration and doctors to be disabled with schizophrenia since 2004. I am doing well at handling and saving money. My therapist of about ten years is largely pleased with the progress I’ve made since reconnecting with medication and therapy in 2019, specifically. –Christopher Milbourn