news story / By Japhet Weeks

Who Killed Martin Cotton?

Signs point to manslaughter, but don’t expect arrests

(March 27, 2008)  More than six months after the death of Martin Frederick Cotton II, it’s still hard to say for sure what exactly killed the 26-year-old. At one point it was believed that he might have died of a rare overdose of LSD. Or that he killed himself by banging his head against a jail cell floor. Now the most likely answer seems to be that Cotton was killed by a severe blow to the head delivered in the form of a punch or a kick. But even this new wrinkle in the case is unlikely to provide any real closure for Cotton’s family — who recently filed a wrongful death and civil rights violation claim against various local agencies — since determining who delivered that fatal blow may prove near impossible.

The reason for the uncertainty is the fact that on Aug. 9, 2007, the day Cotton died in police custody, he was involved in several altercations, the first with men in the outdoor day-use area of the Eureka Rescue Mission known as the “cage,” and the second involving multiple Eureka Police Department officers who were called to the scene. Someone hit Cotton fatally, either an officer or a person at the shelter, but the autopsy can’t tell us who.

Memorial photos of Martin Frederick Cotton II, second from right at bottom. Photo by Yulia Weeks.

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Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager determined that Cotton, who had high levels of LSD in his system at the time of his death, died of a subdural hematoma due to blunt force trauma, but there were no abrasions on Cotton’s scalp, which makes it difficult to determine how he was hit.

Last week Jager told the Times-Standard that there were four possibilities as to when Cotton sustained the blunt force trauma that eventually killed him: It could have happened on the way to the homeless shelter (Cotton was released earlier that day from jail and arrived at the shelter around 5 p.m.), during one of the two subsequent altercations or in police custody when he was videoed thrashing about in his jail cell.

But when reached at his office on Monday, Jager told the Journal that the two most-likely scenarios are that Cotton sustained a subdural hematoma during one of the two fights he was in.

At a Town Hall meeting in August of last year, Eureka Police Chief Garr Neilson denied the use of excessive force by the EPD and said that Cotton’s death was most likely self-inflicted. But Jager disagrees. “It was probably unlikely that it occurred in the jail cell,” he said, “because of the padded nature of the cell.” Cotton was placed in a cell with fully padded floors and walls, a space designed specifically to avoid self-inflicted trauma. Jager also said that it’s highly unlikely Cotton sustained the injury on the way to the shelter.

That means that Cotton most probably suffered a subdural hematoma in the cage or during his altercation with the police. Senior Detective Neil Hubbard of the EPD said Tuesday that all possibilities as to Cotton’s cause of death had been investigated, including whether or not he had been hit in the head fatally while still in the cage. Hubbard said he wasn’t at liberty to speak about the case as it was still being reviewed by the Humboldt County District Attorney’s office, but he did point out that no arrests have been made of anyone who was in the cage that day in connection with Cotton’s death.

The Journal reported last August that an employee of a nearby business, who didn’t want his name to be used at the time because he was worried he’d be “harassed” by the cops, had a bird’s eye view of the altercation, and said he’d seen an officer hit Cotton in the back of the head.

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