Can there be lesson for police in senseless death?

The videotaped encounter between Oakland police and Hernan Jaramillo offers only fuzzy images of what led to Jaramillo’s death on that July night in 2013, but the audio works just fine.

The 51-year-old Oakland resident can be heard telling police officers again and again and again — more than 20 times — that he can’t breathe, that they’re killing him. His sister, Ana Biocini, can be heard pleading with officers to let her brother sit up so he can catch his breath.

Minutes later, Jaramillo goes silent — and the video ends, but Biocini, 62, will never forget what she heard next. As her brother lay face down on the sidewalk outside their home on East 21st Street with three police officers on top of him, she heard one of the officers say to her brother: “OK now, because you are quiet, you can sit.”

But it was too late. Jaramillo never regained consciousness. He died before paramedics arrived.

In the legal world, his case is a clear-cut example of a wrongful death — settled by the city for $450,000 last month.

Beyond the boundaries of a legal definition, Jaramillo’s death was much worse than that.

It was a shameful and callous death — carried out by the very authorities Biocini called for help when she heard noises coming from her brother’s bedroom that made her think an intruder was trying to get into her house.

“At the same time I was calling the police for help, I was calling the guys who were going to kill my brother in the street,” she said.

She is racked by guilt, and there are family members who blame her for her brother’s death, she said.

The news release put out by the Oakland Police Department at the time was clearly intended to obfuscate what really happened and provide as few facts and details as the law allows.

“As officers attempted to place the subject into a police vehicle, he resisted. During the ensuing struggle, the subject and the involved officers went to the ground. The subject then became unresponsive. Officers immediately performed CPR while waiting for emergency medical personnel to arrive on scene.”

That’s about as sterilized a version of events as you will ever hear. It fails to convey the officers’ demeanor, an apparent lack of concern and a laissez-faire attitude about the man’s obvious distress. The official statement also lacks the details Biocini witnessed standing just 15 feet away. As soon as officers entered their home, Biocini identified Jaramillo, wearing a tank top and boxer shorts, as her brother, but police remained suspicious.

“He called me by name, and I called him by name,” Biocini said. “It was clear we knew each other.”

Nonetheless, they handcuffed him and led him outside to a police car.

“Am I under arrest?” Biocini heard her brother ask. When police told him he wasn’t, he refused to get into the patrol car. That’s when the aggressive police tactics began. One of the officers used a leg sweep to take Jaramillo down, and officers then dragged him from the patrol car to the sidewalk. Once down, three officers held him, including an officer who placed his knee in Jaramillo’s back.

Jaramillo objected and pleaded long and loud. He kept screaming his sister’s nickname, Betina, and calling for help. Restrained by two officers, she could do nothing but watch.

It turned out that Jaramillo wasn’t the potential threat police considered him to be. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from San Francisco State University in the mid-1990s. After college, he worked as a licensed Realtor until the recession in 2008. He lost his job and his home in Richmond, but not his spirit. He was down and depressed for some time but bounced back, completed a certificate program at Skyline College in San Bruno, and was as a salesman for a solar panel manufacturer in Hayward at the time of his death, his sister said.

My greatest hope is that the outrageous, unnecessary, violent death of Jaramillo three years ago will be a lesson of what not to do as police academies prepare our officers to serve the public. Every police officer needs to learn to recognize the sound of a vanquished voice — because that’s what Jaramillo was trying to tell them. They never bothered to divert from the book long enough to recognize human frailty — and it cost Jaramillo his life.