‘We Had to Do It’: Salt Lake City Police Trainee Follows Command to Cut Dead Homeless Man with Utility Knife As Senior Officers Laughed and Smirked, Video Shows. Family Outraged
Several officers with the Salt Lake City Police Department were disciplined for directing or not objecting to a trainee officer using a utility knife to cut the skin of a dead homeless man last year.
Bodycam footage released with a statement by the police department last Friday shows the officers approach a tent where sun-blistered Jason Lloyd, 47, was found dead in August of 2024, and then instruct the rookie cop, Dakota Smigel, that he needed to move the body.
“I feel like you’re pranking me,” Smigel said. “Why are you smirking like that?”
Next Smigel — who was only on his 11th shift — was handed the knife by a contractor from the medical examiner’s office and told to “pop multiple blisters on Mr. Lloyd’s right arm,” according to the police department’s summary of their investigation into the incident.
Smigel proceeded to slice away, as several officers watched and laughed.
“You guys suck,” Smigel said after he finished the gruesome task.
“We had to do that,” Officer Mark Keep, Smigel’s field training officer, responded.
“It’s OK,” Smigel said.
According to the Salt Lake City PD’s statement, Keep then instructed Smigel to leave out any mention of the blister popping from his official incident report, which he did.
Lloyd’s death was later ruled an accident.
The abuse of Lloyd’s body by police only became public last August after several Salt Lake City PD officers upset about it contacted local news outlet Fox13, which began reporting on the department’s internal investigation and filed an open records lawsuit.
Six months later, Police Chief Mike Brown announced that seven officers had been put on administrative leave during their probe of misconduct during a death investigation, which exonerated three officers and found that four officers had violated one or more police or city policies. All but one have returned to work.
The violations included policies for standard of conduct, death investigation procedure, report preparation and the field training officer program, police said.
Keep violated eight department policies and resigned in lieu of discipline, reported Fox13.
Officer Paul Mullenax, one of the officers who told Smigel to cut Lloyd’s blisters, violated four policies and received an unpaid, three-day suspension.
Officer Michelle Peterson violated two department policies and received a warning. Internal affairs records show Peterson may not have witnessed the cutting, but she made disrespectful comments such as telling Smigel that he is “able to now say that he ‘cut a b****.’”
Smigel was found to have violated one policy, but did not have a written record showing discipline. Police said the officer-in-training had “reasonable grounds to believe his actions were allowed” based on the instructions and egging on he got from the more experienced police officers and medical examiner’s office personnel on the scene.
“Our investigation found that some of the conduct in this case was unprofessional, discourteous, disrespectful and offensive,” said Brown. “This behavior does not align with the professionalism and integrity we demand as a police department. I extend my deepest condolences to Mr. Lloyd’s family. Every person we encounter deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Several months after his funeral, Lloyd’s family was horrified by what they saw in the newly released police video, reported the Salt Lake City Tribune.
“When Jason passed away, we weren’t able to have an open casket, we weren’t able to have that closure that you usually get when a loved one passes,” Lloyd’s sister Heather Fisher said through tears. “And now our closure is seeing him on a bodycam video in a tent being treated that way.”
“He was homeless, but he was still loved,” Fisher said. “He had a family, and he was still very deeply cared for. And they treated him horribly.”
“We’re frustrated because this investigation has been going on since August and, as his family, we had no idea. We had no idea he was treated poorly. We had no idea he was disrespected,” Fisher said. “We feel like we’re grieving all over again.”
Experts told Fox13 there is no reason for an officer to cut through blisters on a dead body.
“Every person who is passed away and is in our care as a law enforcement agency should be treated with the utmost respect no matter who they are, how they died, what they did prior to the death. It’s our job to be respectful,” said Jennifer Shen, retired director of the San Diego Police Department Crime Lab. “You only get one crack at the evidence.”
Chris Burbank, the former chief of Salt Lake City PD, said the investigation should have only taken two days — not six months.
“This is not a hard investigation,” Burbank said. “Especially if there’s a video that demonstrates this and shows this. I would be outraged if this was my relative!”
The Salt Lake City District Attorney’s Office and the Utah Attorney General investigated the incident. The DA determined in February that the evidence in the case did not support a criminal charge, police said. Prosecutors for the attorney general’s office have not filed any criminal charges.