For nearly six minutes, Samuel Chang slurped in desperate, ragged breaths as four men held him down on a Chatsworth street on Halloween night.
“Stop fighting us and I will loosen up,” says a man in a He-Man costume, who can be seen restraining Chang in a chokehold, in a video that captured the encounter two years ago.
Minutes later, Chang went limp. The men who had been holding him down quickly performed CPR, and paramedics were called.
Chang would remain hospitalized for weeks — suffering a hemorrhage, kidney failure, severe head trauma and other injuries that he says still affect him to this day — and Los Angeles police detectives later concluded he was the victim of a felony assault at the hands of an off-duty city firefighter, court records show.