Red Emma’s

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner’s Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these cases: coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.

Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims’ families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.

The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.

True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner’s Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

Terence Keel is an award-winning scholar, the founding director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, and a professor of human biology, society, and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science co-editor of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion. Keel has received fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Ahmed Ragab is a historian, physician and a documentary filmmaker. He is the founding director of the independent Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and co-founder of Pinwheel Productions—a film production studio dedicated to supporting Black, Brown and Queer artists and stories. He received his medical degree from Cairo University School of Medicine in 2005, and PhD from the Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 2010.

About Tawanda Jones: On July 18, 2013, two plain-clothes officers in an unmarked car pulled a 44-year-old black man, Tyrone West, over in a residential neighborhood in East Baltimore for an alleged minor traffic infraction. Witness statements indicated that he was pulled out of his car and attacked by the police. What ensued was the brutal murder, by beating and suffocation, of Tyrone by 17 Baltimore City police officers and one Morgan State University officer. After the untimely demise of her brother Tyrone, Tawanda Jones created West Wednesday. She and her supporters have protested and lobbied for nine years—over 480 consecutive weeks—to change laws. A God-fearing woman, single mother, preschool teacher and freedom fighter, Tawanda has been featured on CNN, MSNBC and PBS, in the podcast “Issue” and HBO’s “Baltimore Rising,” in Baltimore Magazine, the Baltimore Afro-American, the New York Times and the Real News Network, and in Wes Moore’s book, Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. Tawanda testified for the report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States, and to the United Nations. She was apart of pushing for the 2020 elimination of gag orders for those involved in Baltimore City police settlements. Tawanda has been around the world standing in solidarity with many families that are suffering from police brutality and murder. “Cant’ stop, won’t stop until killer cops are in cell blocks!”