The Anton Black case featured on NBC’s Dateline is the 2018 death of a 19-year-old Black teenager who stopped breathing after three white police officers and a white civilian chased him, fired a Taser at him, and pinned him facedown outside his mother’s home in Greensboro, Maryland. Dateline aired its report in August 2022 with Lester Holt reporting from the Eastern Shore, and by then the case had already reshaped Maryland policing: a criminal conviction of the police chief who hired the lead officer, a $5 million civil settlement, a state transparency law bearing Anton’s name, and a wider reckoning with how Maryland’s medical examiner’s office had classified deaths in police custody.
What the Dateline Report Covered
The August 2022 broadcast examined the night Black died and the warning signs in the lead officer’s background that his hiring department had missed or ignored. Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told Holt: “I could tell you with some degree of certainty that Thomas Webster should not have been a Greensboro police officer at all.” Johnson also reviewed the body camera footage and said he did not “see any indication of malice,” describing the officers’ actions on scene as meeting “professional standard.”
The report noted that the 911 call describing Black dragging a younger boy came from a bystander who did not know the two were longtime acquaintances. It also drew the line that gave the case national resonance: the same former Maryland chief medical examiner who signed off on Black’s autopsy later testified for the defense of Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd.
What Happened on September 15, 2018
On the evening of September 15, 2018, a 911 caller in Greensboro reported that Anton Black was dragging a younger boy down the street. The two were longtime acquaintances, and Black had been observed on a bridge putting the boy in a headlock. Greensboro Police Officer Thomas Webster IV responded and initiated a foot chase. Off-duty Ridgely Police Chief Gary Manos, in plain clothes, and off-duty Centreville Police Captain Dennis Lannon joined the pursuit. A civilian bystander wearing what the ACLU of Maryland later described as a “Confederate motorcycle helmet” also took part.
The officers caught Black on a ramp in front of his mother’s home. According to body camera footage and the subsequent federal lawsuit, the men tackled Black, fired a Taser at him, forced him facedown to the ground, handcuffed him, and applied leg restraints. They held him prone for roughly six minutes, pressing on his chest, shoulders, and limbs beneath their combined body weight. Body camera footage showed Manos had the most sustained physical contact with Black during the restraint. Black’s mother, Jennell Black, watched from her home. She later recalled hearing her son call out to her and shout “I love you” while handcuffed. He lost consciousness, went into cardiac arrest, and was pronounced dead.
Black’s family said he was experiencing a mental health crisis at the time. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had no weapon.
The Autopsy Controversy
The autopsy was performed by the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner under Dr. David Fowler, who led the office from 2003 to 2019. The office ruled the death accidental, attributing it to sudden cardiac arrest caused by a congenital heart condition. The report listed Black’s bipolar disorder as a “significant contributing condition” and referenced claims that he may have ingested marijuana laced with stimulants. It stated explicitly that there was no evidence Black had been asphyxiated by the officers’ restraint.
The family rejected these findings, noting that Black’s prior sports physicals had never turned up a heart condition. Independent experts they retained concluded he died of positional asphyxiation from being held facedown with weight on his body until he could no longer breathe. The family’s later federal lawsuit alleged the medical examiner’s report was written to “obfuscate” the role police played in the death and that the office relied on “false police narratives” about drug use and “superhuman” strength.
The controversy sharpened in April 2021 when Dr. Fowler testified for the defense at Derek Chauvin’s trial. Both Black and Floyd were restrained prone by multiple officers until they died. The ACLU of Maryland accused Fowler’s office of a pattern of creating “false narratives” to shield police in fatal encounters involving Black individuals, citing Tyrone West and Tawon Boyd alongside Anton Black.
Officer Webster’s Prior Record
Before joining Greensboro, Thomas Webster IV had been a corporal with the Dover Police Department in Delaware, hired there in 2005. On August 24, 2013, responding to a fight at a Dover gas station, Webster kicked an unarmed Black man named Lateef Dickerson in the head as Dickerson was getting on the ground in compliance with commands. The kick, captured on dashcam, broke Dickerson’s jaw and knocked him unconscious. A grand jury indicted Webster on second-degree assault in May 2015, and a jury acquitted him in December 2015 after 16 hours of deliberation. Webster resigned from Dover in February 2016 with a $230,000 severance settlement from the city.
Despite that history, Greensboro Police Chief Michael Petyo hired Webster and filed a certification application with the Maryland Police and Correctional Training Commission that omitted nearly 30 use-of-force reports from Webster’s Dover career. Once the omissions came to light through news reporting, the Maryland Police Training and Standards Commission voted in April 2019 to hold a decertification hearing and formally decertified Webster on July 26, 2019.
The Chief Who Hired Him Was Criminally Convicted
In November 2019, the Maryland Office of the State Prosecutor charged Petyo with misconduct in office over the factual misrepresentations and intentional omissions in Webster’s certification paperwork. On January 17, 2020, Petyo pleaded guilty in Caroline County Circuit Court. Judge Paul M. Bowman sentenced him to two years in prison, suspended, with three years of supervised probation. Petyo had already left the Greensboro Police Department in January 2019 during the state investigation into the hiring.
No officer involved in the restraint was criminally charged. In January 2019, Caroline County State’s Attorney Joseph Riley declined to seek charges, saying his office lacked sufficient evidence and calling the events “tragic acts” but not criminal ones. The Maryland State Police closed its investigation in March 2019 without recommending charges. Internal reviews by the departments involved found no wrongdoing.
The $5 Million Federal Settlement and Police Reforms
On December 17, 2020, Black’s family and the Coalition for Justice for Anton Black filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Black et al. v. Webster IV et al. (Case No. 1:20-cv-03644-CCB). Defendants included Webster, Petyo, Manos, Lannon, the towns of Greensboro, Ridgely, and Centreville, and officials with the state medical examiner’s office, among them Dr. Fowler and medical examiner Russell Alexander. The ACLU of Maryland and Arnold & Porter represented the plaintiffs. The complaint alleged excessive force, negligent hiring, racial bias, and a cover-up in which police fabricated a narrative of drugs and superhuman strength that the medical examiner then relied on.
In January 2022, a federal judge denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss and rejected qualified immunity for the officers and medical examiners. On August 12, 2022, the family and Coalition reached a $5 million settlement with the three Eastern Shore towns and the individual officers and police chiefs. The settlement also mandated police reforms across the three departments: overhauled use-of-force policies, enhanced resources and guidance for mental health emergencies, mandatory training in de-escalation, bystander intervention, and implicit bias, increased transparency in police hiring, and simplified complaint procedures for residents. The federal court retained jurisdiction to enforce the reforms.
The Medical Examiner Settlement and Statewide Audit
On November 8, 2023, the Maryland Board of Public Works unanimously approved a separate settlement resolving claims against the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The agreement provided $100,000 to the Black family and estate and $135,000 in attorney’s fees. More consequentially, it required the office to adopt its first-ever explicit policy for autopsies of people who die in law enforcement custody. Under the reforms, the office follows National Association of Medical Examiners guidelines, including classifying a death as a homicide if it would not have occurred but for the intentional conduct of another person. Medical examiners are barred from receiving input from law enforcement or other non-employees during autopsy examinations. All autopsy results must be reviewed by the chief or deputy medical examiner before release, and families are guaranteed the right to seek correction or review of findings.
Fowler’s Chauvin testimony also triggered a broader audit. The Maryland Attorney General’s Office reviewed in-custody deaths investigated under Fowler’s leadership from 2003 to 2019 and published a 70-page report on May 15, 2025. From more than 1,300 potential cases, auditors selected 87 involving deaths during or shortly after restraint. Independent three-person review panels disagreed with the medical examiner’s original determination in 44 of those 87 cases. In 36, the reviewers unanimously concluded the deaths should have been classified as homicides; the medical examiner’s office had ruled them undetermined, accidental, or natural. In five more, two of three reviewers reached the same conclusion.
The audit found the office was “especially unlikely to classify a death as a homicide if the decedent was Black, or if they died after being restrained by police.” “Excited” or “agitated” delirium had been cited in 42 of the 87 cases, and in those the office classified the manner of death as undetermined 93% of the time; independent reviewers classified 56% of those same cases as homicides. Governor Wes Moore signed an executive order directing the Attorney General to consult with local prosecutors about reopening flagged cases and establishing the Maryland Task Force on In-Custody Restraint-Related Death Investigations.
Anton’s Law
In 2021, the Maryland General Assembly passed Senate Bill 178, the Maryland Police Accountability Act of 2021, known as Anton’s Law. Sponsored by State Senator Jill Carter and Delegate Gabriel Acevero, the law amended the Maryland Public Information Act to allow the public to request access to internal police misconduct and disciplinary records that had previously been shielded as private personnel files. Governor Larry Hogan vetoed it. The Maryland Senate overrode the veto 30-17 on April 10, 2021, and the law took effect October 1, 2021. It passed as part of a broader reform package that also repealed Maryland’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, making Maryland the first state to do so.
Jennell Black described what she witnessed in a statement released through the ACLU: “I had to watch those police officers kill my son, while he pleaded for his life and called out to me. There are no words to describe the immense hurt that I will always feel when I think back on that tragic day.” Anton’s sister LaToya Holley said the family had “worked tirelessly to bring accountability in Anton Black’s case and to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening in our community again.” Coalition spokesperson Richard Potter called the case “a flash point for the police reform movement in Maryland.”