Grief Re-Lived: Police Killing of a Good Samaritan Doctor

Three decades’ worth of medical training and psychiatric practice didn’t prepare me to deal with the sudden and tragic loss of my wife at the hands of the police sixteen years ago. My emotional wounds from her killing have reopened again with the trial of Derek Chauvin.

My wife, Dr. Jameela Yasmeen Arshad, was a physician with training and experience in internal medicine, urgent care, emergency medicine, and neurology. We had been married for 22 years, and she was the mother of my only child, Nadeem, who was 19 years old when she died. On January 10, 2005, she came home after a full day at her clinic. We lived in Kenner, a small town in the suburbs of New Orleans, La. Shortly after, around 10 pm, she left home to go to the store.

During her drive, she witnessed a roadside accident and stopped to care for an injured young man. When police arrived on the scene, she was arrested violently and handcuffed, on her back in a prone position. They sat on her back, and then she was thrown into the police car and left unattended. She went into cardiopulmonary arrest and died in the back of the police car in handcuffs. This whole incident was allegedly a result of her inability to produce an ID instantly to prove that she was a doctor.

Born as Karlene Marie Murray, my wife adopted the name Jameela Yasmeen Arshad after converting to Islam when we married in 1982. Jameela was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica in 1953 and moved to the USA after finishing high school in 1971. She completed her undergraduate degree at Lehman College in Bronx, N.Y., and went on to get her Doctor of Medicine degree at George Washington University. She did her internship training in Surgery and Internal Medicine and later completed her Neurology residency at Tulane University Medical School.

We were living in a nice subdivision in a supposedly ‘safe’ neighborhood. Jameela had an MD attached to her name. All of these factors didn’t save her from being stereotyped as a black woman. The officer apparently couldn’t conceive of a black woman in private clothes being a doctor. I question whether her fate would have been the same if she were not black. I even question my decision to move to America 40 years ago. What America am I living in, where a black physician can’t even be a Good Samaritan without putting her own life at risk?

Watching the Derek Chauvin murder trial reminds me of my civil case against the Kenner Police for Jameela’s wrongful death, which produced no results in our favor except for Arshad vs. the City of Kenner, a landmark ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court that prohibited the City of Kenner from waiving its prohibition of jury trials for a single case. Still, no one paid any price or was held accountable for Jameela’s death. The government claimed that her death was a result of heart problems, even though she had no history of any heart issues. During the trial, they engaged in victim-blaming and assassinated her character. Derek Chauvin’s trial seems like a re-run of my case. The language, the tactics by the defense, the medical terminology by experts seem to be a part of the same script as in my wife’s wrongful death trial. I feel strongly that the outcome in that case would be different if we had mobile phone and body cam videos.

I am reliving my grief and am filled with anger, guilt, frustration, and tears. My son has suffered immensely as a result of his mother’s death. As a biracial American, he has personally experienced unfair and unjust treatment by police. I live in constant fear for my son’s safety, where any law enforcement encounter could cost him his life.

As a psychiatrist and from my personal life experience, I am keenly aware of what trauma can do to the human psyche. Any reminder of the traumatic experience can cause worsening of post-traumatic stress and complicate grief resolution. What my son and I are experiencing is not unlike the millions whose wounds have been refreshed by repeated incidents of police killings.

Police brutality against Black people in America is truly blind. This brutality and injustice does not care whether you are an unemployed black man across from a convenient store, a black EMT technician asleep at home, or a black physician engaged in a Good Samaritan act.

America has made some strides on racial injustice since Jameela died. But we still have a long way to go to eradicate institutional racism in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

Since the murder of George Floyd, there has been a rejuvenation of the Black Lives Matter movement. While witnessing police brutality’s daily reminders, I feel I am not alone anymore, and I don’t have to suffer in silence. Like millions across this nation, I felt a sense of relief and comfort that finally, justice was served when Derek Chauvin was convicted. This conviction will not end the pain of those who lost their loved ones to police brutality. But it provides some hope that we will begin to understand institutionalized racism, which has been a stain on the soul of this nation for over four centuries.

– M Kaleem Arshad, MD

This article originally published in the May 3, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.