'Essentially bystanders': Lawsuit slams cops for watching for 13 minutes as man drowned

The mother of a man who drowned in a Tennessee river is suing the Knoxville Police Department, saying officers stood and watched the struggling man for 13 minutes without helping, The Washington Post reported.

The lawsuit says officers stood by after Mika Wheeler Clabo, 30, fell into the Tennessee River, only calling a Knoxville Fire Department rescue boat and refusing to allow patrons and workers from a nearby restaurant to help, warning them not to go in the water.

The lawsuit states that none of the officers or EMT who were on the scene attempted to physically help Clabo, and the rescue boat only appeared three minutes after Clabo went underwater.

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“Mika deserved better than what he got … from people who were supposed to be first responders,” Kimberly Williams-Clabo's lawyer, Lance Baker, told The Post. “The first responders were essentially bystanders looking on.”

“If he had received actual trained first responders instead of bystanders,” the lawyer added, “the result may have been different.”

The morning before he drowned, Clabo was seen in a T-shirt and underwear acting "erratically." He was reportedly in recovery for opioid addiction.

The officers “acted with no urgency whatsoever throughout the incident to respond to the life-or-death situation,” the suit alleges.

The lawsuit asks for $4 million in damages.