A father of four died in a jail cell of ‘natural’ causes in a case that may have gained little or no attention had it not been for a video recording of the incidents the evening before his death where he begged with the words ‘I can’t breath’ 19 times as correction guards pepper sprayed and piled on top of him.

Michael Sabbie, 35, was a doting father of four, he often posted about his kids on social media, his last post thanking god for his kids was just hours before his arrest.

Sabbie was taken to Bi State Jail, which sits directly on the border between Texas and Arkansas and is a for-profit prison.

The guards repeatedly pepper sprayed him, man-handled him and ignored his please uttering the words synominous with the death or another black male, Eric Garner.

He was in custody around 48 hours and was found dead in the morning.

The Huffington Post reported:

The basic details of Sabbie’s death, one of more than 800 jail deaths counted by The Huffington Post in the year after Sandra Bland died in jail on July 13, 2015, wouldn’t normally raise much suspicion. The initial news reports said that Sabbie, who was arrested on a domestic assault charge, was found “unresponsive” on the morning of July 22, 2015, suggesting he died in his sleep. A medical examiner ― noting Sabbie’s obesity and that he had significant heart muscle damage ― deemed his death “natural,” a label that implies it was an unavoidable tragedy. Those circumstances wouldn’t make Sabbie’s death terribly unique: Heart disease killed an average of 226 jail inmates a year from 2000 until 2013, making it the leading cause of jail deaths after suicides.

But calling Sabbie’s death “natural” obscures more than it illuminates, and would hide the failures that very likely could have prevented his death. A quick internal investigation might have absolved jail employees of any wrongdoing. But in Sabbie’s case, there’s video.

“If you just looked at the cause of death, you would think that Michael died of some sort of hypertensive heart condition, and that may be true,” said Erik J. Heipt, one of the attorneys representing the Sabbie family. “But if we didn’t have a video, we’d never know that he had been begging for help due to his shortness of breath and inability to breathe. We’d never know that he said ‘I can’t breathe’ 19 times in the nine minutes that we hear in that video.”

This death should not go without FULL investigation and we need to try and make sure that he doesn’t slip under the carpet like so many deaths have. It’s hard with everything happening right now but we have to keep trying.

Please read more on the Huff’s original article here.

The full disturbing video can be seen below:

Thanks for reading.