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Mika Wheeler Clabo cried out for help the morning of July 25, 2022, while struggling to keep his head above the waters of the Tennessee River in Knoxville, a lawsuit alleges. For 13 minutes, he gasped and groaned as he tried to pull himself out of the water or free himself from the vines that had ensnared him.

No one helped Clabo — not the four police officers who watched him struggle from a few feet away, not the two EMTs who were on the riverbank before his head went under, and not the restaurant employees and diners who pleaded with officers to help, or at least to let them try, the suit alleges.

A year later, his mother is suing the city of Knoxville, its police chief and the four officers, accusing them of violating her son’s civil rights in a case of wrongful death. In a 32-page lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, Kimberly Williams-Clabo alleges that the public employees contributed to her son’s drowning by not only refusing to make any serious attempt to rescue him but also warning private citizens not to do so.

“Mika deserved better than what he got … from people who were supposed to be first responders,” her lawyer, Lance Baker, told The Washington Post. “The first responders were essentially bystanders looking on.”

The city of Knoxville and its police department declined to comment on Williams-Clabo’s lawsuit.

Courtesy Lance Baker

In the days before July 25, 2022, Clabo, a 30-year-old master arborist, “lost everything” he had worked for over the previous two years: his new car, his self-esteem and his sobriety, the lawsuit says. As a teenager, Clabo became addicted to opioids and later turned to heroin to feed an addiction that led him to be incarcerated multiple times, the suit says.

But he eventually became clean and “began the long, hard road to recovery,” according to the suit. He excelled in a court-sponsored rehabilitation program. He moved into a halfway house in Knoxville and got a job at a salvage yard, where his boss described him as a “hard-worker, always early … never refused overtime.”

But in the days leading up to his death, Clabo relapsed, the suit states.

On July 21, his mother reported to Knoxville police that he was missing.

Then, around 10 a.m. on July 25, witnesses saw him being kicked out of a car in downtown Knoxville wearing only underwear and a T-shirt, according to the suit. Dozens of people called 911 to report him “acting erratically” and looking like he was “running away from something.”

A Knoxville officer in a cruiser spotted Clabo walking on nearby railroad tracks, the suit states. Then, he watched him jump a fence and run across a parking lot toward a restaurant that sits above the Tennessee River.

The officer approached Clabo, asking him, “What’s going on over here?” Clabo walked away slowly.

“Hey, whatcha doin?” the officer asked him, according to the lawsuit, which cites body-camera footage.

Clabo bolted toward the water as the officer called out for him to “come on back when you’re done.” Seconds later, at 10:14 a.m., Clabo fell over the brushy riverbank and tumbled into the murky waters of the Tennessee. The officer called for the Knoxville Fire Department to send a rescue boat.

Then, the officer allegedly asked Clabo to get out of the water, repeatedly told him to swim and then ordered him to make his way over to the dock. At 10:17, the officer told a restaurant employee that he couldn’t reach Clabo and scoffed at the notion of Clabo’s drowning, the suit states. Then, the officer allegedly told Clabo to relax and “hang out down there, dude” until the rescue boat arrived.

A second officer arrived at 10:21 and, after spotting Clabo, said “he’s not going anywhere,” according to the suit. A third got to the scene shortly after that and merely watched what was happening, right around the time Clabo was shouting and gasping in the water, the suit alleges.

The officers “acted with no urgency whatsoever throughout the incident to respond to the life-or-death situation,” according to the suit.

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Clabo continued to struggle. At 10:25, as the first officer and a restaurant employee walked around the dock with a clear view of Clabo, the employee told the officer “that tree’s wrapped around his neck,” the suit states. A minute later, one of the other officers allegedly radioed dispatch to tell firefighters that they didn’t think Clabo would cooperate with directives to swim or grab hold of something. Seconds later, Clabo gasped loudly, a sound captured on one of the officer’s body-camera videos.

At 10:27, his head disappeared under the water.

Twenty-two seconds later, an officer can be heard on body-cam video saying, “Yeah, he went under,” the suit states.

Standing on the dock with his arm resting on a pole, the officer who first saw Clabo said, “What do we do?” according to the lawsuit.

About two hours later, divers found Clabo’s body close to where he had fallen in — near the water’s edge, according to the suit. He was ensnared in vines, his head mere inches below the surface of water that was about 5 or 6 feet deep, it alleges.

Knox County medical examiners determined that Clabo’s death was an accidental drowning, the suit states.

But Baker, the family’s attorney, said that Clabo might have lived if officers or EMTs had done something or allowed private citizens to help.

“If he had received actual trained first responders instead of bystanders,” the lawyer added, “the result may have been different.”

Livingston Award, finalist, 2018

University of California, Berkeley, BA in English

Jonathan Edwards is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. Before joining The Post, he covered public safety for The Virginian-Pilot and Lincoln Journal Star.

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Knoxville police watched as a man drowned, Tennessee lawsuit says

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