James Adell died in June 2013 after Hagerstown police restrained him during a chaotic encounter that began with reports of a man wandering through backyards, and this week the Maryland Attorney General's Office announced it will not reopen his case, even though a statewide audit concluded his death should have been classified as a homicide.
The office said it found insufficient evidence to reopen Adell's case, according to WBFF. Adell, a 34-year-old Black man, died on June 23, 2013, after being restrained by a Hagerstown police officer, and his death is one of 41 in-custody restraint cases across Maryland that independent forensic pathologists say were misclassified by the state's former Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The Attorney General's Office reviewed investigative files from both law enforcement and the medical examiner's office as part of its case-by-case review, and prosecutors ultimately agreed with the Washington County State's Attorney's Office, which had declined to pursue criminal charges in October 2013.
According to files from that night, Hagerstown police received a 911 call around 8 p.m. reporting that a Black man had entered a caller's home twice without permission. A second call came in around 8:40 p.m., describing a man who had jumped a fence into a backyard, tried opening several parked-car doors, and yelled that people were trying to shoot him. A third call around 9 p.m. described a man waving his arms over his head and acting erratically in a neighbor's backyard; the caller's husband reported seeing Adell lying in the street, talking to himself.
What Happened When Officers Arrived
A Hagerstown police officer responded to the first call but was unable to locate the reported intruder. When an officer later tried to speak with Adell, he ignored the officer and walked away, then became agitated during the interaction, continuing to wave his arms and speak incoherently. Witnesses said Adell had been acting strangely in the days before his death, and police had taken him to a hospital two days earlier, where he was held overnight for psychiatric evaluation.
Officers applied leg restraints to Adell after he began to thrash, kick and resist, and two additional officers arrived to help hold him down, placing him in a position with one officer holding his legs and another holding his shoulders and torso. Witnesses reported that Adell resisted the officers, including kicking at them, and some told investigators he may have been under the influence of drugs. Toxicology testing later found both THC and cocaine in his system, and his body temperature exceeded 107 degrees Fahrenheit.
When officers noticed Adell was no longer breathing, they turned him onto his back, removed the restraints, and began CPR. Paramedics arrived and took over resuscitation efforts before taking him to a nearby hospital, and an officer had called for emergency medical evaluation as part of the response. Adell was pronounced dead the following day, June 24, 2013. An autopsy performed on June 26, 2013, ruled his manner of death undetermined.
An Audit Born From a National Reckoning
The review that reexamined Adell's death traces back to a controversy that erupted far from Hagerstown. Dr. David Fowler, Maryland's chief medical examiner from 2002 to 2019, gave expert defense testimony in April 2021 arguing that George Floyd's death should have been ruled undetermined rather than a homicide, testimony that, as The Washington Post reported, ignited national outrage and raised questions about his office's past rulings. More than 450 medical experts signed a joint letter condemning Fowler's testimony as evidence of pro-police bias, and the petition specifically raised concerns that Maryland's medical rulings had shielded officers from legal scrutiny, according to Courthouse News.
That pressure led Governor Wes Moore to issue an executive order requiring the state to examine 41 restraint-related deaths spanning 2003 to 2019, according to The Daily Record. An independent audit released in 2025 had already reviewed 87 in-custody restraint deaths statewide, with 12 forensic pathologists working in three-person panels while initially blinded to the decedents' race and original rulings, per the Maryland Office of the Attorney General. Auditors concluded that 41 of those 87 deaths, none of which the medical examiner's office had classified as homicides before the audit, should have been ruled homicides instead.
According to Maryland General Assembly committee testimony dated Feb. 23, 2022, SB 558 was described as a follow-up to the state's broad police reform legislation enacted the previous year.
Debunked Diagnosis, Racial Disparities Flagged
The audit found that 42 of the 87 reviewed cases cited excited delirium, a diagnosis since rejected by major medical organizations, and that more than half of the 41 reclassified homicides had relied on that term, the Washington Post reported. Attorney General Anthony Brown announced that medical examiners under Fowler's tenure were statistically less likely to rule a death a homicide when the decedent was Black or died following police restraint, with three-quarters of the reexamined decedents identified as people of color, according to the Associated Press.
In Adell's case specifically, two of the three independent medical examiners who reviewed the original findings concluded that the manner of his death should have been ruled a homicide. But a homicide classification, state officials stressed, only means a death resulted from a volitional act by another person — it is not, by itself, a legal conclusion, and it does not establish criminal intent or culpability. That distinction, drawn from National Association of Medical Examiners guidelines, is central to why the Attorney General's Office says a reclassified homicide does not automatically trigger charges, per the Maryland Office of the Attorney General.
A Pattern of Declined Reviews
Adell's case is not the first to end this way. On July 1, 2026, the Attorney General's Office established a formal review protocol giving families of the 41 audit decedents 30 days to review investigative files and submit additional evidence before final decisions are announced publicly. Weeks later, on August 21, 2026, the office declined to reopen the 2010 restraint death of 41-year-old Mary Croker in Baltimore County, despite auditors finding her death was also a homicide; Croker died during an arrest after being held face-down on her stomach.
Maryland Attorney General's Office prosecutors and investigators say they are conducting a comprehensive review of all 41 audit cases, requesting investigative material from state's attorney's offices, police departments, and decedents' family members and their attorneys. In Adell's case, the office said it found insufficient evidence to prove criminal culpability beyond a reasonable doubt. As of September 2026, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has not changed the original manner or cause of death certification for Adell or any of the other 40 reclassified cases, leaving the official record unchanged even as the audit's conclusions remain unresolved on paper.
