Michael Broady Called 911 in Reform Alabama and Died. Two Officers Settled. Two Deputies Remain in Court

Michael Broady called 911 in August 2021 from Reform, Alabama, and told a dispatcher someone was trying to kill him. Officers from the Reform Police Department, the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office, and the Carrollton Police Department rolled on that call. They held him on outstanding warrants, including a child-support hold out of Lamar County. He never left that encounter alive.

Nearly five years later the federal file is no longer one block of defendants. In 2026 the estate settled with officers Kallenna Homan and Austin Moss and dropped them from the suit. U.S. District Judge Annemarie Carney Axon signed an order on May 28, 2026, dismissing those claims with prejudice after the parties resolved them. Terms were not released. Claims against Pickens County deputies Brian Herd and Taylor Gregory stayed open. A mediation date was set after the partial deal. That split is the new angle: two officers bought peace. Two deputies still have to answer the video.

What the body cameras actually show

The recordings run about 40 minutes from a Pickens deputy and about 30 from a Reform officer. Broady talks with the officers. Then the tone drops. He is taken to the ground. Audio catches shouted commands, repeated Taser cycles, and one officer yelling, «Let go of my Taser.» The family’s lawyers say he was shocked while prone and handcuffed. The footage later shows him dragged and carried to a cruiser. As the door fights shut, another Taser cycle appears to fire inside the car. He was pronounced dead at the Carrollton Hospital helipad.

AL.com published a condensed clip in December 2025. The longer files from the family’s firm spread from there. Broady’s sister, Dequita Manuel, put the question the video forces: «He was handcuffed. It took five of you to do that — and none of you thought to stop?» Body-camera audio also captures Broady dialing 911 a second time from his own phone while cuffed, telling the dispatcher that police had not arrived even as officers stood a few feet away. AL.com and ABC 33/40 documented the tapes.

An autopsy that refused to pick a side

The Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences listed both cause and manner as undetermined. The examiner found two Taser barbs in the torso, blunt-force abrasions across the body, and an acute fracture of the left hyoid bone with internal hemorrhage and no external neck wound. That pattern, the report said, suggested a «relatively broad compressive force» to the front of the neck. How much it contributed to death was left open.

Toxicology showed methamphetamine at 2,800 ng/mL, described as a potentially fatal range, plus amphetamine and THC. Defense lawyers treat that number as the case. The family’s lawyers treat the hyoid fracture, the flashlight-as-choke allegation, and the Taser cycles on a cuffed man as the case. The examiner left the door open to revisit the finding if more facts arrived. The death is still not a homicide on paper. That undetermined box is why both sides still talk as if they are winning.

Who is still in the lawsuit after the 2026 settlements

DeQuita Broady, Michael’s sister and estate representative, filed Broady v. Herd et al. in 2023 in the Northern District of Alabama, Case No. 7:2023cv01097. Early defendants included Deputy Herd, Reform Police Chief Kenny Young, the City of Reform, the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office, the Town of Carrollton, and the Town of Gordo. Two Carrollton officers were later dropped. Pickens County itself was voluntarily dismissed in February 2024.

A November 2025 corrected Fourth Amended Complaint added detail from the newly reviewed video: overlapping Taser cycles while Broady was prone and cuffed, a flashlight used against his neck, a Taser fired into the cruiser, a door slammed on his head, kicks on the ground, and failing oxygen gear at the jail sallyport. Those are allegations. They have not been proven at trial.

Homan of the Reform Police Department and Moss, identified in later filings as a Gordo officer who had also been listed as a Pickens deputy in earlier accounts, reached a settlement and were dismissed, WBRC and WVUA 23 reported. Attorney Johnathan Austin said the estate would keep litigating against Herd and Gregory and hoped the rest of the case could still resolve. Settlement amounts were not made public. A late-May joint status report said Herd and Gregory were in settlement talks. Montgomery attorney J. Randall McNeill, who represents those two deputies, said his clients deny wrongdoing and confirmed mediation.

What the officers say happened

McNeill has said Sheriff’s Office defendants reject the excessive-force claims. He has argued Broady gained control of a Taser and used it on officers, and that the methamphetamine level was dangerously high. Counsel for the City of Reform officer denied the allegations and said the officer did not know of mental-health or substance issues during the call.

Austin told ABC 33/40 the opposite frame: «This is not a case about someone threatening officers or the public — it is about a man who called the police for help and, despite officers knowing he was in crisis, was met with extreme force rather than restraint or de-escalation.» Co-counsel Richard Rice has tied the file to other Pickens County custody deaths.

Judge L. Scott Coogler’s March 2024 order cut supervisor and some failure-to-train theories and let excessive-force and bystander claims against direct actors proceed. That is why Herd and Gregory still matter. The later Axon dismissal of Homan and Moss did not touch those remaining counts.

Three Black men dead in one small county

Pickens County has fewer than 20,000 people. Between 2019 and 2021 three Black men died in police encounters there. Wallace Wilder was shot during an April 2019 wellness check. Glenn Foster Jr., the former New Orleans Saints lineman, died in December 2021 after a chase in Reform; an autopsy found strangulation. Austin and Rice wrote Governor Kay Ivey that the pattern under Sheriff Todd Hall included «a complete lack of transparency» and that the race of all three men was not a coincidence.

In December 2023, Reform officer Dana Elmore was accused of repeatedly tasing Micah Washington, who was changing a tire near his aunt’s house. That file produced a $20 million federal suit after video surfaced in late 2024. Broady sits in the same stack of Taser-and-restraint cases. The AEGIS Alliance has tracked similar rural force files in its police accountability coverage and in the off-duty officers case against a Black bouncer.

Broady’s mother, Carolyn, said the assignment was simple: cuff him, put him in the car, take him to jail. «He’d still be alive today.» His daughter, Mackenzie Hollinger, had spoken with him hours earlier. He had promised ice cream. Her young son never met his grandfather. «We know he’s not coming back. We just want justice for him.»

What a partial settlement does not close

Two officers are out. Two deputies are not. Mediation may end the rest of the docket, or it may not. Comparable Alabama custody-death matters have settled in the mid-six figures. Plaintiffs think the video supports more. The defense thinks the undetermined autopsy and the toxicology cut the other way. Through early September 2026 no public filing showed Herd or Gregory dismissed.

Readers following force cases on this desk can also start with The AEGIS Alliance U.S. news stack. The man on the tape called the same number twice. The second time he was already in cuffs. That is the fact no settlement can edit.