After reading it in more detail (should have started out that way), I see that Carson is just saying it couldn’t have happened by just a failure to place a seatbelt on him like the prosecution is charging.
That’s the problem with most people who comment. They read the headline and then make a conclusion without bothering to read the article.
Yeah, a deeper reading of the article is necessary.
However, I will say that when I was in elementary school a kid knocked himself out during a school bus ride. There was one particular bump on the route where if you were sitting in the last couple rows (behind the rear wheels) and pushed up at just the right time going over it you could catch serious air. The kid pushed up too hard and put the top of his head right into the bus’s metal roof.
He didn’t have anything more than a slight concussion, and it was the 70’s, but we were still all banned from doing that, as a result.
It’s easy enough to imagine a scenario where if he’d come back down differently, out of his seat and onto the rear emergency exit door handle, it could have been a lot worse. So I’m not quick to dismiss the notion that police negligence (failure to strap him in) or even an act of commission (”nickle ride” back to the station) were major contributing factors in the fatal injury.