It’s been more than a decade, but supporters never gave up on their crusade for Tyrone West, who died after struggling with Baltimore Police in 2013.

His sister, Tawanda Jones, has staged hundreds of weekly protests called “West Wednesdays” in an attempt to keep the pressure on her brother’s case, which was initially ruled to be the result of a mix of factors, none of them caused by police.

“I have never stepped away from this fight,” Jones told supporters on a livestream Wednesday, the 616th weekly gathering of her supporters.

On Thursday, independent pathologists commissioned by the state concluded West’s case should be reclassified as homicide and looked at for possible reinvestigation in an effort spurred by Gov. Wes Moore. It was one of 36 cases in which the massive audit found that the state’s former chief medical examiner, Dr. David Fowler, fell down on the job and mislabeled dozens of its most sensitive cases.

The audit will not immediately reclassify the deaths, including West’s, or lead immediately to criminal charges against law enforcement involved in those cases, if at all. A medical determination of homicide means that someone caused the death, not that a crime was committed. The audit did not provide details of how they reached their conclusions in individual cases such as West’s, but generally found the possibility of racial and pro-police bias.

The Banner reached out to Fowler on Thursday but he did not immediately return a request for comment.

West, 44, was pulled over by city police officers Nicholas David Chapman and Jorge Omar Bernardez-Ruiz in Northeast Baltimore for backing into an intersection. They said they suspected he had drugs in his sock and later said they found cocaine.

West began to resist and fought with a group of officers that swelled to 12 from Baltimore Police and Morgan State University. They punched him, pepper-sprayed him, hit him with batons and pinned him to the ground, the officers said in statements.

A woman riding in West’s car, Corinthea Servance, told investigators that officers continued to hit West even after he gave up.

“He was saying, ‘You got me, you got me, stop hitting me,’” Servance told investigators.

Another witness, James Price, told investigators that when the other officers got there, “all of them piled in, beating him and kicking him, beating him and kicking him, until the guy went out.”

“They could’ve put handcuffs on him without doing all that,” Price said.

A 2013 autopsy found that West died from a heart issue that was worsened by dehydration, heat and the struggle with police, while an independent autopsy later commissioned by the family in 2016 pegged the cause of death as asphyxiation while being restrained.

The city’s top prosecutor at the time of West’s death, Gregg Bernstein, said then that the officers used “objectively reasonable force,” a finding later supported by an independent board convened on West’s death, though the panel also said officers made tactical errors that “potentially aggravated the situation” and did not follow basic policies.

Bernstein’s successors Marilyn Mosby and Ivan Bates rebuffed calls to revisit the case.

The city and state reached a joint settlement of $1 million with West’s children in 2017.

The case became something of a political football between the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office and attorney general’s office in 2023.

Bates formally requested that Attorney General Anthony Brown take up West’s case with the “understanding that Mr. West’s loved ones have obtained additional information that would compel a new investigation into the incident.”

However, the attorney general’s office said it had no authority to review a case that occurred prior to 2023 because state’s attorneys still had primary responsibility for the cases during that time.

With the release of Thursday’s audit, Gov. Wes Moore ordered the state attorney general in consultation with local state’s attorney and Maryland State Police to reexamine more than 40 cases in which an independent conclusion was that the manner of death was homicide.

And West’s case is among them.

Jones, West’s sister, hinted Wednesday night that she had been informed of Thursday’s news.

“Right now, I’m dealing with so much stress,” she told supporters. “Keep my family in prayers. I’m not at liberty to go into details, but we finally got our day.”

Reached by phone Thursday after the announcement, Jones said the audit was not the end for her.

Though she’s glad “the truth is now completely out,” Jones said, she wants to see the police who were involved in her brother’s death prosecuted, citing the case of Derek Chauvin, the officer who was convicted in the 2020 murder of George Floyd, as an example.

“Until I see a killer cop in a cell block, my brother’s not resting,” Jones said. “Nor am I.”

Banner reporter Cody Boteler contributed to this story.