By Michael Phillips | Riptide Analysis
Donovon Lynch was 25 years old when he was shot and killed by a Virginia Beach police officer at the Oceanfront on March 26, 2021. He was not a suspect. He was not being chased. He was a bystander — a young Black man who happened to be in the wrong place when Officer Solomon Simmons fired three shots in the dark.
There is no body camera footage of the shooting. No visual record of Lynch’s actions in the final seconds. No physical proof that he pointed a weapon. His body was suspiciously moved before medical aid was even attempted. No charges were ever filed against Simmons.
Five years later, Virginia Beach’s Independent Citizen Review Board deadlocked on the case — issuing no findings, no recommendations, and no formal conclusion. Lynch’s cousin is Pharrell Williams, one of the most recognizable musicians on earth. The case received a brief burst of coverage when Pharrell spoke out, and then the media moved on.
Riptide has covered the Lynch case in depth. You can read that reporting here.
This piece is about something adjacent to that story: the pattern of cases the media never covers at all.
A Phrase the Media Only Hears Sometimes
Most Americans know the phrase “I can’t breathe.” They know it because of George Floyd — because the media made sure they knew it. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May 2020 generated wall-to-wall coverage for months. The New York Times alone has published more than 6,000 stories referencing his name. Statues were proposed. Streets were renamed. His death became a national reckoning with how police treat the people they are supposed to protect.
This article doesn’t dive into whether that reckoning was wrong or not. The question this piece asks is simpler: why does it only happen sometimes?
On the night of December 3, 2025, an 18-year-old university student named Henry Nowak was stabbed five times on a street in Southampton, England. He called the police for help. When officers arrived, his attacker told them Nowak had made racist remarks. So they handcuffed the victim.
On the ground, bleeding out, Nowak told the officers over and over: I’ve been stabbed. I can’t breathe. Please, brother, I can’t breathe.
An officer responded: “You’ve been stabbed, mate? I don’t think you have.”
Henry Nowak died in handcuffs. His killer, Vickrum Digwa, was convicted of murder on May 28, 2026, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Hampshire Police released the bodycam footage on June 1, 2026 — six months after Nowak’s death, and only after the conviction.
As of this writing, the story has generated almost no coverage in American legacy media.
And then there is Brooke Murdoch.
Santa Cruz, June 28, 2021
Brooke Murdoch was 13 years old when Santa Cruz Police Department officers arrived on the evening of June 28, 2021. She is 18 now. Her mother, Rhonda Reyna, is a former forensic scientist — a criminalist — for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s crime lab. What happened that night is documented not just by advocacy groups, not just by social media accounts, but also by the city of Santa Cruz’s own Independent Police Auditor.
Officers had responded to a custody dispute. According to the IPA’s Third Annual Report, when they arrived, Rhonda was holding Brooke. Officers moved to arrest Rhonda. As they did, an officer grabbed Brooke’s arm. Brooke fell to the ground. She screamed and cried for her mother.
What the IPA report describes next is worth reading carefully: officers handcuffed Brooke, attempted to get her to her feet, pushed her against a patrol car, performed a leg-sweep takedown on her, placed her face-down on the ground, and had shackles put on her ankles. She was then carried to the patrol vehicle. She was screaming that she couldn’t breathe.
She was thirteen years old.
The IPA’s report — a document produced by the city’s own oversight body — was critical. It noted that no de-escalation was attempted. It noted that the “extreme distress” of being separated from her mother “was predictable.” It noted that officers gave Brooke “numerous orders to comply, but none addressed her distress.” The report produced two formal recommendations to the Santa Cruz Police Department on de-escalation policy.
Those recommendations were entered into the record. The bodycam footage of the incident has never been released.
The Mother Who Also Couldn’t Breathe
Before Brooke was shackled, something else happened that evening. Witnesses reported that Rhonda Reyna had been strangled by her ex-partner. She was experiencing post-strangulation symptoms — a medical emergency that law enforcement officers are trained to recognize — when she was placed in handcuffs in the back of a patrol car.
According to Reyna, an officer came to the patrol car and told her that Brooke was hyperventilating and didn’t want to go with her father. Then Brooke was taken anyway. A mental health hold was placed on the child. She was transported to a psychiatric facility.
Reyna has since filed a federal civil rights lawsuit: Reyna v. City of Santa Cruz et al., N.D. Cal. No. 23-cv-03121-SI. Named defendants include Santa Cruz Police Officers David Deady, Adam Riddell, Angel Serrano, Ryan Kiar, Sergeants Ruben Badeo and Mark Eleveth, and others.
In a written response to Reyna dated September 6, 2022, Santa Cruz Police Deputy Chief Jon Bush stated: “We do not release body camera footage under these circumstances.” The footage has not been produced.
What the Auditor Found, and What Happened Next
The Santa Cruz Independent Police Auditor’s report on Case No. 16 is a remarkable document. It is an official city record acknowledging that a 13-year-old child was physically subdued, shackled, and carried to a police vehicle while screaming for her mother, and that officers at no point attempted to de-escalate or address her distress.
The IPA made Recommendation Fifteen: the department should require officers to document de-escalation efforts in incident reports. It made Recommendation Sixteen: the department’s review of force incidents should include whether de-escalation was warranted.
Neither the report nor the recommendations generated any coverage in American legacy media. Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty publicly told constituents there would be “consequences” for police putting their hands on children. There have been no reported consequences.
The Selective Reckoning
Three cases. Three different victims. Three different states, countries, and circumstances.
Donovon Lynch was a young Black man shot without warning by a police officer in Virginia, his body moved before medical aid arrived, the officer never charged, the oversight board deadlocked five years on. Henry Nowak was a white British student who bled to death in handcuffs while begging officers to believe he had been stabbed. Brooke Murdoch was a 13-year-old girl in California, shackled and kneed while screaming she couldn’t breathe, her mother handcuffed in a patrol car having just been strangled, the city’s own auditor documenting the force used against her.
This is not an argument that George Floyd’s death did not matter, or that the coverage it received was undeserved. The officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck was convicted of murder. That accountability was the direct result of public pressure generated in part by media coverage. The standard that coverage set — that people who say they cannot breathe deserve to be believed, and that officers who ignore them should be held accountable — was the right standard.
The question is why that standard is applied selectively.
Lynch’s case had Pharrell. It had grief, documented questions, and five years of unanswered demands. The review board deadlocked anyway, and the national press largely moved on. Nowak’s footage dropped yesterday. Brooke’s case has a city auditor report, a federal civil rights lawsuit, witness interviews, witness videos, photographs, and a Deputy Chief on record refusing to release the bodycam. None of it generated a single story in legacy American media.
The phrase “I can’t breathe” is not the property of any single case. It is a description of what happens when a person is in distress, and no one in authority stops to ask whether they are telling the truth. The media decides which of those moments becomes a reckoning, and which disappears entirely. That decision is not neutral, and it is not random. It is worth asking who makes it, and why.
Riptide’s full coverage of the Donovon Lynch case is available at riptide.report/cases/donovon-lynch-case/ and donovonlynchcase.com.
The June 28, 2021, incident involving Rhonda Reyna and Brooke Murdoch is documented under SCPD Case No. 21S03661. In a written response dated September 6, 2022, Santa Cruz Police Deputy Chief Jon Bush stated: “We do not release body camera footage under these circumstances.”
Rhonda Reyna is a named source in Riptide’s ongoing series on California’s broken public defense system.
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