Tawon Boyd

Tawon Boyd was a 21 year old forklift operator and father from Baltimore, Maryland, whose death in September 2016, days after a violent encounter with Baltimore County police and fire personnel, became one of the state's most closely watched cases of a death following police restraint. Boyd was not a public figure by profession or achievement. He became known to the wider public only because of the circumstances of his death and the long legal and administrative fight that followed it, a fight that reached a significant milestone on September 25, 2026, when the Maryland Attorney General's Office announced it had found insufficient evidence to reopen the case.

Boyd grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Carver Vocational Technical High School, and was living in Middle River with his fiancee and their young son at the time of his death. Family members later told reporters that the birth of his son had steadied him, and that he had found steady work and was building a life with his fiancee, who was expecting their second child. He was remembered by those close to him as a young father who worked, came home, and looked after his family.

On September 18, 2016, Boyd's fiancee called 911 because he was behaving erratically, and paramedics and Baltimore County police officers responded to the family's home on Akin Circle in Middle River. What followed was a physical struggle between Boyd and the responding officers. Paramedics administered a sedating drug during the encounter. Boyd went into cardiac arrest, was resuscitated, and was taken to Franklin Square Medical Center, where he died on September 21, 2016, two to three days after the confrontation, at the age of 21.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner later ruled the death accidental, concluding that it was unlikely that the police restraint caused or significantly contributed to Boyd's death, and attributing it primarily to intoxication from a synthetic drug. Boyd's family disputed that account, arguing that officers used excessive force and that paramedics should not have given him an antipsychotic medication. They filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2017, and in 2019 Baltimore County agreed to pay 1.15 million dollars to settle the case, one of the largest such settlements the county had reached over an allegation of excessive police force.

The case resurfaced nearly a decade later as part of a broader state audit examining 41 restraint related deaths in Maryland between 2003 and 2019. On September 25, 2026, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General announced that, after reviewing the investigative file from Boyd's death as part of that audit, it had found insufficient evidence to reopen the matter for further investigation or criminal prosecution against the officers involved. The decision closed, at least for now, a case that Boyd's family had pushed for years to have reexamined, and it renewed public attention to a death that had first drawn national notice in 2016.