A Texas sheriff was arrested on Monday on a charge of tampering with evidence over destroyed video of a traffic stop during which a black man died after being repeatedly shot with a Taser.
Javier Ambler, 40, was pulled over on March 28, 2019, after a deputy sheriff in Williamson County noticed that he hadn’t dimmed his headlights to oncoming traffic. Deputies tried to pull Ambler over, who continued to drive for more than 20 minutes before crashing his vehicle in downtown Austin.
Bodycam footage that was first released in June 2020 showed several officers holding Ambler down beside his vehicle after the crash. One officer can be heard yelling, “Give me your hands, or I’ll tase you again.” Ambler, restrained on the ground, says, “I have congestive heart failure,” and repeatedly says that he cannot breathe.
Ambler was tased four times during the encounter. About three minutes into the video, an officer can be heard requesting aid for an “unresponsive” suspect. After being transported to Dell Seton Medical Center in Austin, he was pronounced dead.
The bodycam footage was one of two videos taken that night. The second was a recording made by the reality TV show Live PD. Crew from the show accompanied the deputies, but that footage has never been seen publicly.
In June, representatives of the show told the Austin-American Statesman that law enforcement never asked for the footage and it was destroyed. “As is the case with all footage taken by Live PD producers, we no longer retained the unaired footage after learning that the investigation had concluded,” the network said in a statement.
Following a grand jury that heard from 19 witnesses, Sheriff Robert Chody and assistant attorney Jason Nassour were accused of tampering with or destroying footage from the March encounter.
The district attorney in Travis County, Margaret Moore, argued that such video would be “wholly material to the investigation.”
Chody was released on bond Monday and accused the prosecutors of being politically motivated, arguing that they were covering up their own actions during the investigation of Ambler’s death. His lawyer argued that the Live PD footage was not necessary to the investigation because the shots from the bodycam footage “show completely what happened. … There is nothing that was on those Live PD videos that could in any way alter the outcome of this case.”
