After over six weeks of waiting, over 100 calls to West Virginia State Police, and even an announcement by the governor, it can feel as if everyone but the family of Edmond “Eddie” Exline knows how he died.
On Monday, that three officers were on leave and a criminal investigation had been launched.
But although multiple officials have copped to the existence of video—which could tell, once and for all, what really happened during the deadly encounter—state police have yet to release it.
“What I’ve seen the video is not great because it’s at night time on a Sunday night but the audio is horrible,” former state police Superintendent Jan Cahill told talk radio host Hoppy Kercheval in an interview after his exit from the agency. “And I won’t go into the details because it’s an active investigation.”
The growing cloud over what really happened that day is darkened by a history in Berkeley County of alleged police brutality by state troopers. In 2018, police were caught on video allegedly beating a teenager in the same county, and state cops have recently become the subject of an expanding misconduct probe after an anonymous letter was sent to lawmakers—prompting, it seems, Exline’s case to cross the governor’s desk.
On Monday, Justice admitted he, too, had seen the video, and called the case “very very concerning.”
Exline, relatives said, grew up on a farm right over the border from the eastern panhandle of West Virginia with his four brothers, where he learned to love working with the earth and, later, to ride motorcycles.
“They were spoiled. There you go. They were spoiled,” said Hartman-Exline. “They got what they wanted and… up until they were adults, you know, them boys lived with [their mother] the rest of her life.”
Exline’s father, a trucker and a Vietnam veteran, struggled with mental illness, the family explained.
Eventually, Exline’s mind also began to fight against him as well, and he was first diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-2000s, according to a GoFundMe posted by Balzhiser.
“The Exline family has been plagued with mental illness. If it’s not been PTSD or paranoid schizophrenia or just something throughout the family,” said Hartman-Exline. At one point, she said, “you know, we had to love him from a distance.”
“If there is anything in this world that my son knows it’s that his dad loved him.”
Despite multiple run-ins with the law, including domestic violence-related allegations, Balzhiser said that Exline’s actions were driven by his illness and the failures of society to protect those who are sick.
He was “the best dad that he knew how to be,” Balzhiser told The Daily Beast, a sentiment echoed by his son.
Exline helped teach his son to farm and ride a bike and how to work on cars, and never missed a baseball game, family members said.
“And if there is anything in this world that my son knows it’s that his dad loved him and his dad did not deserve to die by the very hands that should be protecting him,” Balzhiser said.
State authorities still have yet to release Exline’s body to family or any basic information about his cause of death to family or the press.
“We need to hold not only the wv state police responsible but the United States we need to work as a country and get long term facilities nationwide for our mentally ill,” Balzhiser wrote to The Daily Beast, also explaining in her GoFundMe that “anyone who knows this disease would know once they are on meds they think they are better and stop taking the meds.”
“We put these mentally ills in hospitals long enough to make them seem a little normal then throw them back out on the streets. It don’t work and it’s just getting worse,” Balzhiser told The Daily Beast. “The system fails our mentally ill. The [West Virginia] state police have failed our community.”
