WEST WARWICK — A couple who witnessed the struggle between police and a mentally ill man who died in police custody Friday night says they saw five officers on top of the man as he lay face down on the ground, his legs kicking, while the officers tried to handcuff him.

Nicole Frink yesterday recalled standing at her bedroom window with her boyfriend, Mark Fiore, at about 11 p.m. and watching the man getting “elbow jabs to the ribs” as the officers pinned him down on the parking lot pavement behind Joyal’s Liquor Store, at 90 West Warwick Ave.

At one point, the man on the pavement turned his head to the right, said Fiore, and an officer “smashed him in the face with his knee.”

The officers were responding to a call from a motorist who reported seeing people damaging the liquor store’s sign. The first officer on the scene found 47-year-old Mark Jackson, who had been staying at his mother’s apartment next door, walking behind the liquor store.

The West Warwick police said in a statement issued Saturday that Jackson “did not comply with officers’ requests” and that as they approached him he became “combative.”

The officers struck Jackson with their batons on his “lower extremities,” according to the police statement. Jackson was “speaking with officers as he was being placed in the police vehicle.”

Upon arriving at the station within two minutes, the statement says, the officers “discovered Mr. Jackson was no longer breathing.”

The police yesterday declined to make any statements about the cause of death pending a scheduled autopsy today by the state medical examiner’s office.

Yesterday, local officers and state police detectives canvassed the neighborhood, questioning witnesses. The five officers involved in the arrest have been assigned to “administrative duty,” said West Warwick Capt. Mark Knott. The police declined to identify them.

Inside the West Warwick apartment where Jackson had been staying with his mother, family and friends gathered yesterday in grief and shock.

“It’s all wrong,” Jackson’s mother, Juanita “Anita” Jackson, said. “He was headed home — walking home.”

His sister, Karen Petro, of Warwick, said her brother had never been in any trouble before. The man described in the statement by West Warwick police, she said, was not the brother she knew.

“They killed him. They killed him,” Petro said, her voice cracking. “And, as his sister, I’m not gonna let this go away. I know my brother and he’s never done anything …”

MARK DAVID JACKSON, of 777 Cowesett Rd. in Warwick, grew up in Pittsburgh, the youngest of five children. He attended high school and later worked as an auto mechanic. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, after his parents separated and his father died, that he became “very withdrawn,” his sister said.

It was after he came to live in Rhode Island in the mid-1980s that Jackson was diagnosed with schizophrenia. For a time, he was on medication, his mother said, but in recent years he had stopped taking it.

He received federal Supplemental Security Income payments, his mother said, and managed his own money. But he spent most of his time at his mother’s apartment, sleeping in the bedroom that she’d given up, she says, because she preferred the living room couch.

“He was very quiet; he never said anything,” his mother said. “I’ve never known him to put a hand on anybody.”

She said her son spent his days lazing in the bedroom, watching TV or lost in his own thoughts. Occasionally, he played an electronic keyboard she had bought him. She didn’t drive, so she’d given him her 1993 Mercury Sable and he drove her to doctor’s appointments and to the grocery store — usually preferring to wait in the car until she returned.

Jackson was a familiar figure to people who worked in the nearby stores. He’d stop in each morning at the Dunkin’ Donuts to buy a large iced coffee—with cream and sugar—and a “supreme pizza,” said Julie Monteira, 21, who works behind the counter. He’d often stroll over to Joyal’s Liquor Store to buy Phillies miniature cigars, said Patricia Rajotte, a store employee. He’d sometime sit quietly by the liquor store loading dock, smoking.

On Friday night, it was warm in his mother’s apartment and Jackson went out for a walk, his mother said. He wore black trousers and a navy dress shirt. His mother waited up for him.

AT ABOUT 11 p.m., from the window of her second-floor bedroom overlooking the parking lot of Joyal’s Liquor Store, Frink, who works the night shift at the store, said she and Fiore were in bed watching TV when they heard a commotion outside. The couple said they went to the window, shut off their air conditioner so they could hear better, and watched as five officers pinned down a man they later learned was Mark Jackson.

The first officer to arrive called immediately for backup, said state attorney general spokesman Michael Healey, yesterday recounting information from a state police detective investigating the incident. After the second officer arrived, the two requested additional backup, he said. Three additional West Warwick officers responded. Jackson “had his hands in his pockets,” Healey said, “and the police commanded him to take his hands out of his pockets several times and he wouldn’t.”

Officers were knocked to the ground while scuffling with him. They then used pepper spray but it “seemed to have no effect,” according to the statement released by the West Warwick police. “Officers then used their expandable batons to deliver strikes to Mr. Jackson’s lower extremities. It was not until additional officers arrived that they were able to handcuff Mr. Jackson and place him in the rear of a police vehicle and transport him to the police station.”

Frink said she recalled hearing officers shout “Get your hands down! Put your hands down on the ground now!”

During the struggle, she said, Jackson kept screaming, “I love you. I love you.”

She said the episode she witnessed lasted about 10 minutes.

After the officers handcuffed Jackson, she said she saw a cruiser pull up to where he was lying, face down and motionless. One officer went around to the door on the opposite side to open it, she said, while three other officers lifted Jackson—two holding his legs and a third his upper body — and shoved him into the cruiser.

“He was not moving when they put him in the car,” she said. “He literally looked lifeless.”

Frink said she went to the state police barracks on Saturday and gave a statement about what she saw that night. At the time she made the statement, she said, she did not know who Jackson was or that he had died.

The state police and the West Warwick police are conducting a joint investigation into the death with the assistance of the Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch’s office.

If the state medical examiner cannot conclude from the autopsy that Jackson died of natural causes, Healey said, then a grand jury probably will be convened.

larditi@projo.com