On August 24, 2019, an unarmed 23-year-old man, Elijah McClain, was injected with ketamine during an encounter with law enforcement and paramedics in Aurora, Colorado. McClain went into cardiac arrest and died days later. The case would eventually cast a national spotlight on the potential dangers of forced sedation.

The day after McClain’s ultimately fatal encounter, another unarmed young man, about 1,000 miles away, was also sedated by paramedics while being restrained by police.

He was a 24-year-old whose dad said he had an “infectious” smile. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder while in the Marines and honorably discharged. His name was Taylor Ware. And the little-known story of his death unfolds in Documenting Police Use of Force, a documentary from FRONTLINE, The Associated Press and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism that probes deaths nationwide after police used force not intended to be deadly, and is available to stream online now.

Drawing on witness accounts and footage from cell phones and body cameras, the above excerpt from the film sheds light on Ware’s encounter with law enforcement — during which Ware would be bitten by a police dog, stunned with a Taser, held down on the ground in handcuffs and injected with ketamine.

READ: Dozens of Deaths Reveal Risks of Injecting Sedatives Into People Restrained by Police 

As the excerpt reports, it all happened after Ware’s mother, Robin Rank, called 911 seeking mental health help for her son.

Ware had just been arrested in Kentucky after exhibiting manic behavior in public, and his mother and a friend were driving him home to Kansas City, Missouri, for mental health treatment. At a rest stop in Dale, Indiana, his mother made the 911 call when an agitated Ware refused to get back in the car. In the excerpt, she can be heard telling a dispatcher that her son is experiencing a mental health episode.

“Will you please make sure to tell them he needs mental help?” she says.

Robin Rank says she warned the first officer who arrived — an unpaid local reserve marshal accompanied by a police dog — that he should wait for backup.

“‘My son is not in his right mind,’” she  says she told the officer. “‘He has no idea where he’s at. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’”

The officer approached Ware, shook his hand and they sat down in the grass.

Then, the dog began to bark.

“The dog tried to attack Taylor,” she  says. “And that set him off.”

Ware began walking away, and the officer and his dog followed. Cell phone footage from Rank’s friend, Pauline Engel, doesn’t show the confrontation, but the officer said Ware pushed him and started running away. The officer released his dog, and a few frames of Engel’s footage capture the canine taking Ware down. A second officer on the scene, who said that Ware had spat at him and tried to grab his Taser, shocked him three times. Another officer arrived and helped handcuff Ware, and a paramedic gave him a shot of ketamine.

WATCH: More on Forced Sedation 

The encounter would end with Ware being rushed to the hospital after the first responders realized he was no longer breathing. He fell into a coma and died three days later. The medical examiner, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, ruled that Ware died from “excited delirium.”

The AP reached out to the police departments, officers and EMS involved, and they declined to be interviewed. A local prosecutor decided against charging the officers, saying in a letter that they had done nothing wrong and showed great restraint and professionalism.

Three police practices experts who reviewed Ware’s case for the AP and FRONTLINE said that the first officer should have waited for backup, and that using the dog was unnecessary and excessive.

Jack Ryan, a lawyer, use-of-force expert, and retired police captain, says in the excerpt that the use of canines is viewed as a “significant use of force.” He says, “Bringing the dog out, in my mind, in a mental health case was not the right action because it’s only going to make it more agitated, more aggravated. It’s going to escalate the event.”

Though Ryan disagrees that the incident was properly handled, he told AP and FRONTLINE “it’s probably not a prosecution case.” The officer initially shook Ware’s hand and tried to establish a rapport with him, Ryan points out, adding that in his mind, the “mistakes” that followed didn’t “rise to the level of criminality.”

“What I see is definitely a lack of training on when it’s appropriate to do certain things,” Ryan says.

According to a database compiled by the AP with the Howard Centers and FRONTLINE, Ware was one of 1,036 people who died after police used “less-lethal force” over the course of the decade from 2012-21. Police say they are often responding to volatile and sometimes violent situations, and deaths are rare. Nearly one of 10 people in the database had been sedated before they died, although it was impossible for the AP to determine the role the medications played in the deaths. As recent AP reporting revealed, the injections were rarely cited in official reports or investigated.

SEE MORE: The ‘Lethal Restraint’ Database

Over and over, the reporters behind Documenting Police of Force found cases like Ware’s in which police had to respond to people undergoing medical or mental health crises — situations law enforcement is often not trained to handle.

“Police themselves are, in many ways, frontline social workers and drug counselors, and they have these many different roles because of the fraying of the social safety net,” the AP’s Justin Pritchard says in the documentary.

The documentary explores how that reality can leave people undergoing mental health crises, family members and police officers in a difficult position.

In Ware’s case, his mother had hoped to get him from that Indiana rest stop to a psychiatric hospital for help.

She never got that chance.

For the full story, watch Documenting Police Use of Force:

Documenting Police Use of Force premiered on April 30, 2024. The documentary is available to watch on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, APnews.com, the PBS App and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. The documentary is a FRONTLINE production with Trilogy Films and Sony Pictures Television – Nonfiction in association with The Associated Press. The writer, producer and director is Serginho Roosblad. The producer is Mike Shum. The AP journalists are editor Justin Pritchard and reporters Martha Bellisle, Ryan J. Foley, Kristin M. Hall, Aaron Morrison and Mitch Weiss. The senior producer is Nina Chaudry. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.

This story has been updated.

---