Trial set for this year in suit alleging Dallas paramedic kicked man in head

A trial date has been set in a federal lawsuit accusing a Dallas Fire-Rescue (DFR) paramedic of kicking a man in the head in 2019.

The trial is expected to take place on Dec. 7 this year, unless it is rescheduled, court documents say.

The (DFR) paramedic, Brad Cox, was captured in police body camera and area surveillance footage from 2019 kicking a man named Kyle Vess several times while he was on the ground.

Vess threw a piece of PVC pipe and tried to fight Cox before he was taken to the ground and kicked multiple times.

“He got up, and he started charging,” Cox told a law enforcement officer on body camera footage at the time.

DFR was responding to a grass fire when they came across Vess. Cox, a former MMA fighter, said in body camera footage that Vess was starting the grass fires on the side of a road.

Cox and his attorneys have declined to comment on the incident over the years. In court filings through his attorneys, Cox has maintained he was defending himself after Vess tried to fight him.

Vess had a black eye, a bloody nose and multiple fractures to his face after the incident, police records show.

Cox was the subject of another federal lawsuit stemming from a 2016 incident. In that suit, Cox and another paramedic named Kyle Clark were accused of falsifying documents to cover up their failure to render aid to a man who needed medical attention.

The man, Hirschell Wayne Fletcher Jr., was homeless and had just reportedly been robbed outside of a Dallas soup kitchen. Cox, Clark and police on the scene laughed at Fletcher while he lay in pain on the sidewalk for more than 10 minutes.

Assuming he was drunk, Fletcher was charged with public intoxication and taken to the city’s detention center. Fletcher was rushed to a hospital the next morning after being found unresponsive in his cell. He died in the hospital from a head injury.

Cox was eventually fired from the department after video of him hitting Vess surfaced. He was later rehired by DFR. WFAA has reached out to Cox’s attorneys but has not received a response as of publication.