DETROIT – They both died pleading, “I can’t breathe.”

One of them made worldwide headlines, and inspired a social justice movement. The other quickly became a statistic, buried with no one held accountable for his death.  

Six years after his death, the family of McKenzie Cochran — a Ferndale, Michigan, man who died when security officers pinned him to the floor at a mall — may get the justice they have long been seeking in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

Like Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer, Cochran died at the hands of white security officers who held him face down on a mall floor, including one who said: “If you can talk, you can breathe.”

Cochran died that day. The autopsy said the cause was compression asphyxiation. No charges were filed, his death ruled an accident. 

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On Friday, Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper, facing mounting pressure from protesters amid a thundering Black Lives Matter movement, asked the state Attorney General’s Office to review the case.

“We sent a letter (Friday) to the Attorney General’s office asking them to review our entire file. The essence of the request is that if they find one scintilla of new evidence, then it should be reopened,” Cooper said in an email to the Detroit Free Press of the USA TODAY Network. “There is never any objection to fresh legal eyes reviewing what was a major examination of the evidence and tapes.”

Cooper sent the letter to the state’s top prosecutor one day after demonstrators protested outside her office, criticizing her for not charging the case and calling for an end to violence against people of color.

Attorney General Dana Nessel said that as of Saturday, she had not yet seen Cooper’s letter and therefore could not comment on it.

Cooper has steadfastly defended her decision not to bring charges in the case, which ended with her concluding that the mall security guards were poorly trained, had no intent to harm Cochran, and therefore shouldn’t be charged.

It’s a decision that still makes Cochran’s brother’s blood boil.

“Something should have been done. Something needs to be done. … I just don’t see how you cannot hold someone accountable for taking someone’s life,” Cochran’s brother, Michael, said in an interview with the Free Press. “My brother did not get justice.”

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Old wounds reopen

Michael Cochran was home taking care of his kids when his mother rang one May afternoon. She was upset and crying, and told him to turn on the TV news.

“She said, ‘it happened again,’ ” recalled Cochran, who then turned on his TV.

He was blindsided. From his television screen, he heard the words that have had haunted him for years: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

It was a news report about the death of George Floyd, whose voice he mistook for his brother’s.

“I was almost confused. Like, ‘wait a minute, what’s happening,’ ” recalled Cochran, who thought for a split second that the news was re-airing his brother’s story.

He quickly realized, he said, that history was repeating itself.

“I was shocked. It  opened up a lot of old wounds,” Cochran said. “It made me feel like, ‘Wow, things haven’t changed.’ “

The recent weeks of protest against police brutality, however, have strengthened Cochran and given him hope that the years-long fight for racial equality is finally seeing some progress. He said that he wants the officers in Floyd’s case — four of them have been charged — to be held accountable.

“We hope that the family of George Floyd gets the justice that our family didn’t,” said Cochran, stressing that he’s not trying to take anything away from Floyd’s case.

But, he does hope that the social movement sparked by Floyd’s death helps lead to justice for his brother.

Cochran, who lives in Virginia, said that he has spoken to police in Michigan in the wake of the protests, and though he wouldn’t elaborate about the conversation, he said: “I’m hopeful that something will come from it.”

Cochran said that he was also contacted by a social justice group called Michigan Liberation, and that the group expressed interest in telling his brother’s story and fighting for change.

“When my brother’s case happened, it happened. …  I felt like it was kind of set aside,” said Cochran, adding that with the exception of a small protest at the mall, there was no big movement challenging his brother’s case.

But that’s all different now.

“Awareness is there, and everybody is paying attention,” he said. “I just hope that it goes down the road and goes through its process and that something good comes from it. Whether it’s intense training, police reforms — all that, so that this doesn’t continue to happen every couple of years.”

‘Just another case number’

An autopsy showed Cochran, 25, died of compression asphyxiation that prevented him from breathing. Video taken of the Jan. 28, 2014, incident by mall shoppers showed several security guards holding him down, one straddling him, as Cochran gasped “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” One officer had his knee in his back.

What led to the arrest was an incident at the L.A. Diamonds store. Minutes earlier, Cochran had approached the counter of the jewelry store and told a clerk that he wanted to kill somebody, police said. It was later determined that he did not have a weapon.

Security guards were summoned. Video captured the officers ordering him out of the mall, but he weaved and appeared to evade them, heading away from the door. A  guard then pepper-sprayed him, seconds before he was taken to the ground. He had no weapon.

After reviewing the case, Cooper determined that the security guards kept him on the ground and constrained him for too long while waiting for police. Cooper consulted a civil rights expert recommended by the U.S. Justice Department who reviewed the videos, police reports and autopsy and determined that “no officers made any serious efforts to restrict Mr. Cochran’s breathing.”

“The problem was it went on for a very long time,” Cooper said, at the time.

None of this makes sense to Cochran’s brother, a former police officer at Purdue University, who said the prosecutor could have charged the security officers with other crimes.

“I don’t understand any of that,” Cochran said. “You have assault and battery, involuntary manslaughter — all those things, but nothing. No justice. No action was taken. It was just another case number.”

A month after Cochran’s death, his family filed an $800 million wrongful death lawsuit against the mall, two related firms and security officers that ended in a confidential settlement.

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Cochran never got to say goodbye to his younger brother, who grew up on Detroit’s west side, playing basketball, football and baseball with the neighborhood kids. McKenzie was known for his baseball skills, showing up once to a church league game in the middle of a late inning. The church was behind until McKenzie took the plate and knocked a couple of balls way out and drove runners in, winning the game.

“That was my boy, my best friend. He was funny. He was caring, and he had just gone back to adult education to get his diploma,” Michael Cochran said. 

After middle school, the Cochran boys moved to Ferndale with their mother, a silk screener whose husband died of an overdose years earlier. Michael Cochran went to college in Indiana on a football scholarship while his brother stayed in Michigan.

The two stayed close over the years.  The last time they saw each other was at their grandmother’s funeral in November of 2013.

Two months later, Michael would get a phone call from his brother, but he was trying to get his daughter down for a nap, so didn’t answer the call.

“He left a message, ‘It’s your brother McKenzie. Call me back.” Michael Cochran recalled. “The next phone call I got — my mother was telling me my brother was dead.”

His brother’s death has haunted him for years. The anger comes and goes. The security officers have never apologized to his family, he said.

 “I felt empty,” he said. “And I felt like the judicial system had failed him.” 

Though he doesn’t like to admit it, Cochran said he believes his brother’s death was about racial discrimination and white privilege.

“I felt like the security officers were being protected at that time,” he said, noting the subject of race is a sore spot for him. His wife is white. He has two biracial children and two white children. He said he still has difficulty admitting that, as he believes, his brother died because he was Black.

“I know it’s true,” he said. “And I don’t like to say it. I don’t want my girls growing up in a world that I know is racist and prejudice.”

But he can’t keep quiet anymore, he said.

“I am speaking out because it’s going to take action and a lot of people to get this thing right, to prevent future incidents,” Cochran said. “Right now, we’re not close. But we are definitely heading down the right path. If NASCAR is banning Confederate flags? That’s a big change and that shows a lot of promise for people.”

Contact reporter Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.

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