‘Just like George Floyd.’ Family wants Tacoma man killed by police memorialized

TACOMA – Manuel Ellis’ mother visits his grave often. She refreshes the flowers and decorates it for the latest holiday, wiping his headstone clean so she can see his name and his face. She says it’s all she has.

Marcia Carterpatterson sat in front of a row of news cameras Wednesday in Des Moines with her daughter and her second son to speak about Ellis’ death in police custody in Tacoma and all that has followed. Carterpatterson showed a photo of the grave on her phone. It was adorned with candles, blue flowers and small American flags flapping in the wind.

Carterpatterson said she didn’t know if going there gives her closure, or if it just makes her feel like Ellis is still part of the family.

“It’s important for me to take care of his last remains,” Carterpatterson said. “Yes, it’s his garden. It’s good for the soul. So that’s what I do.”

More than five years after Ellis’ March 3, 2020 death, and a day after the family announced its wrongful-death lawsuit settled with the City of Tacoma for $6 million, Ellis’ family organized a news conference with their attorney, James Bible. He said it was an opportunity for the family to share their thoughts on the settlement and where Tacoma is headed.

Despite the settlements — $10 million between Tacoma and Pierce County — the mood was not celebratory. Matthew Ellis said the results wouldn’t bring back his brother. He said justice would be having the police officers who killed Manuel Ellis put in jail.

“This is really hard to talk about,” Matthew Ellis said. “Definitely no peace for my family. We haven’t had peace since my brother died.”

Manuel Ellis, 33, who went by Manny, died after an encounter with Tacoma police led to him being beaten, shocked with a Taser three times and pressed to the ground on his stomach with his limbs tied behind his back while officers knelt or sat on him. His last words were, “I can’t breathe.”

The three officers charged with murder and manslaughter in his death, Matthew Collins, Christopher Burbank and Timothy Rankine, were acquitted of those charges in a 2023 jury trial. The City of Tacoma later paid each of them $500,000 to secure their resignations.

Manny’s sister, Monèt Carter-Mixon, said that although the settlements are symbolic of the city and county saying they did something wrong, both could have done more to show good faith to her family and the community that no more harm would be done. She said instead they’ve done the opposite, stating that the city, the Tacoma Police Department and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office had played major roles in covering up her brother’s murder.

Taking the civil case to a jury trial, Carter-Mixon said, would have taken more time, could have led to further appeals and the possibility of a reduction of monetary compensation, if any was awarded by a jury. She said it’s been five years too long.

“You don’t get time to actually breathe,” Carter-Mixon said. “You don’t get time to heal when the constant, you know, wound is being cut open or exposed.”Attorney James Bible speaks during a press conference with the family of Manny Ellis following the city of Tacoma settling for $6 million for the in-custody death of Manny Ellis. 

Bible said he believed that they would have won at a civil trial but that there’s a certain amount of re-victimization possible, and the family wants to move forward. He said they are contemplating what it means for most of the fighting to be behind them.

“I think that the reality now is we’re still hoping for change,” Bible said.

Chief among the family’s wishes is that Manny Ellis’ name not be forgotten. Carterpatterson said it needs to be “Just like George Floyd.” Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis almost three months after Manny’s death.

“Somebody said George Floyd to me, and I said you know what, we have Manuel Ellis, right here in Tacoma, that was murdered brutally and said he couldn’t breathe,” Carterpatterson said.

Carterpatterson suggested that the street where a “Justice for Manny” mural sits in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood, South 11th Street, might be renamed for him. Bible said he’d like to see some form of peace center created in Manny Ellis’ name.

“Develop trainings surrounding conflict resolution, creating programs for people that have addiction issues, creating opportunities and alternatives for kids being in this place where we make sure that Manny’s name is not forgotten here,” Bible said. “And I think that it’s critical that the city find ways to remember this moment so that we don’t repeat it in the future.”

Bible said there were rapid changes in the law between 2020 and 2022 regarding criminal justice, and Tacoma moved faster to implement body-worn cameras for police, but he felt progress had been eroded in recent years. One piece of legislation that he said came to mind was rollbacks to the police pursuit law that had created a higher bar for officers to pursue suspects.

“Some of those laws that were passed early on, when so many people cared about social justice because of the ‘I can’t breathe movement’ and the summer, have been eroded by institutional powers that be in terms of law enforcement and cities, and it’s time to stop that erosion so that we don’t end up in a place where exactly these kinds of things happen again,” Bible said.

Bible also addressed the not-guilty verdict a jury rendered for Burbank, Collins and Rankine in December 2023, blaming the judge who presided over the trial, Bryan Chushcoff, of inserting bias into the courtroom.

Chushcoff, who retired in January, commented to reporters after the trial concluded about accusations that his rulings had favored the defense. He said he tried to make decisions as neutrally as he could, and he felt that legal analysts would agree there was nothing he did that was particularly biased.

Before the verdict came down, a former prosecutor for King County and Seattle who watched the trial’s livestream, Craig Sims, told the Seattle Times that rules of evidence guide judge’s decisions about what’s admissible at trial, and he hadn’t seen anything that gave him reason to believe Chushcoff had done anything inappropriate.

Bible said Chushcoff was critical of evidence in ways that would affect “any caring jury,” challenged experts and helped the defense in ways that he’d never seen in a trial.

About a month after the verdict, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Western Washington said it was independently reviewing the state’s criminal case against Burbank, Collins and Rankine for violations of federal criminal statutes.

Years later, nothing has come of it. Bible didn’t say President Donald Trump’s name, but he said he thought the federal review was “irretrievably impacted” by the November election.

“I think that the November election had a significant impact on whether or not the Department of Justice and its civil rights division can operate in the way that the people need it to,” Bible said.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Emily Langlie, said Thursday that the review remains open at this time.

What’s next for the Ellis family?

Carter-Mixon said she’s interested in going to law school and practicing in Pierce County and Washington. She said she’s also looking at legislation, including at a national level, for ways to make systemic changes.

“In a way, making all courts remember my brother,” Carter-Mixon said. “And if it means seeing me every day representing people that are just like him or that look just like him, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Despite Carter-Mixon’s poor relationship with Tacoma’s city government, she said she loves the people of Tacoma, and it’s her family’s home.

“Tacoma is strong and has always been supportive,” Carter-Mixon said. “Even if I’m just out and I’m wearing his shirt, someone will notice and say I watched the trial, I’m so sorry, it was awful. Or even, there’s people who have kids my age now, and they went to school with Manny, and you know, they always say I hope that you know there is going to be justice for your brother someday.”