Dallas County’s medical examiner updated its website Thursday to say Mohammed Nazeer Paktiawal’s autopsy report was completed and his death ruled an accident. The county normally produces autopsy reports within 90 day days of a patient’s death, and that 90-day mark expired last Friday, which Houston Public Media reported earlier this week.
The full autopsy report was not immediately available Friday. ICE has yet to release the results of an investigation into Paktiawal’s death.
Paktiawal, 41, was seized by ICE agents outside his home on March 13, while he was preparing to take his children to school. According to a detainee death report obtained from ICE by Houston Public Media, Paktiawal was taken to Dallas' Parkland Hospital that evening after experiencing shortness of breath and chest pains.
The next morning, his tongue began to swell, and hospital staff administered epinephrine. Staff began to administer lifesaving procedures a few minutes later, the report shows. But by 9:10 a.m., Paktiawal was dead.
Dallas County normally produces autopsy reports within 90 day days of a patient’s death. That 90-day mark expired last Friday.
Paktiawal, who was known to his family and friends as Nazeer, previously served alongside U.S. Army Special Forces during the war in Afghanistan. He and his family were brought to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. He left behind a widow and six children — all of whom are now in the care of his brother, Naseer Paktiawal.
“They deserve a better life and to continue their life here, because they don’t have a life back home, back in Afghanistan. The only reason that they left that country [was] to find a better future for their children,” Naseer Paktiawal said. “And they deserve that, because he was a wartime hero.”
The ICE detainee death report alleged that Nazeer Paktiawal had been arrested twice in the months leading up to his death, once on accusations of SNAP fraud and once on suspicion of theft. Shawn VanDiver — president of AfghanEvac, an organization that assists Afghan allies resettling in the U.S. — noted that neither charge resulted in a conviction.
Context also matters," VanDiver said. "The Trump administration’s policy directives revoked Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal’s commercial driver’s license, eliminating his primary livelihood. He was a man supporting three boys and three girls in Richardson, Texas, who had spent more than a decade fighting alongside American Special Forces in Afghanistan. When the government stripped his ability to earn a living, he did what desperate fathers do. The arrests ICE is now using to characterize him were the direct result of policies designed to make survival impossible for people like him."
NPR also conducted a criminal background check on Mohammed Nazeer Paktiawal in March and found no convictions.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin promised U.S. Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Texas, during a recent hearing that he would conduct a full investigation into Paktiawal's death. The report of that investigation has yet to be produced and shared with the family, according to Paktiawal’s brother.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee's Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, said he plans to press the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to produce its report on the investigation into Paktiawal's death. Blumenthal said that if the materials are not produced voluntarily, he's prepared to work with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, the subcommittee's chair, to subpoena the documents.
"Mohammed died on a concrete floor in the custody of a government agency," Blumenthal said. "This agency cannot be allowed to cover up and conceal what happened here. They owe the facts and accountability to this family and to the American public and taxpayers."
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