A California man claims in a lawsuit that police officers falsely arrested him and used excessive force after he crashed his car into a 20-foot ditch while having a seizure.Jack Bruce filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. Northern District of California against the Hercules Police Department and the three cops involved in the April 1 incident. Bruce had just visited his grandmother and was driving home when, for the first time in his life, he suffered a seizure. He slowly drove off the road and down into a 20-foot embankment. Two other drivers, who saw he was having a seizure went to his aid, called 911 and relayed to dispatchers what had transpired.
Police and firefighters arrived on the scene and began to assess the situation, body camera footage obtained by Law&Crime showed. Bruce, then 21, looked barely conscious and could not coherently answer first responders’ questions.
“He’s having a seizure, just let him be,” instructed Officer Joshua Goldstein.
But that mindset changed.
“The defendants were trained and knew that the last thing an officer should do when dealing with a seizure victim is restrain him, because seizure victims often react instinctively to physical contact,” the lawsuit said. “Ignoring this training, they repeatedly poked, prodded, shook, and yelled at Plaintiff, ordering him to leave his car.”
Things escalated from there.
Jack Bruce being arrested after a traffic stop in California (Hercules Police Department).
Officers berated him with “Get out of the car” and “We wanna help you, but do not f—ing fight” and “You will get f—ing ripped out of this car.” Bruce seemed confused and had to be pulled out of the car, the video showed.
Bruce’s lawyers say the California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training expects cops to follow a set of protocols on how to deal with someone in the throes of a seizure.
“Medical authorities have long known that attempting to physically control a seizure victim is precisely the wrong thing to do,” plaintiff lawyers Craig M. Peters of Altair Law and David L. Fiol of Brent & Fiol wrote.
The protocol says officers should expect agitated behavior and that should not be “perceived as deliberate hostility or resistance to the officer.”
But Goldstein, along with Officers Angel Garcia and Michael Thompson did the opposite, Bruce claims.
“They attacked him,” Peters and Fiol wrote.
Garcia, who was sitting in the backseat, yanked Bruce out of the car by his hair while Goldstein pulled at his arms. Thompson also aided his fellow officers in removing Bruce out of the car and onto the ground. The officers then began to tase the plaintiff in order to get him to put his hands behind his back. Bruce howled in pain. They picked him up by the arms and the legs and placed him on a gurney before he was taken to a hospital. Bruce suffered a lacerated lip and other cuts and bruises. Much of his shirt was bloodied.
Thompson concluded that “he must be high on something” and Garcia responded, “he’s high as f— on something, I just don’t know what it is.” Plaintiff lawyers also accuse Thompson and Garcia of authoring a police report that was “designed to cover up their senseless use of force by suggesting they had probable cause to believe” Bruce was driving under the influence.
Bruce’s attorneys note that no drugs or alcohol were found in the car. Cops arrested Bruce for resisting arrest but prosecutors dropped the case.
The lawsuit accuses the cops of an unlawful arrest, which violated Bruce’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. His lawyers write:
Defendants Garcia, Thompson and Goldstein had no factual basis for believing that Plaintiff had committed a crime or was an immediate threat to his own safety when they encountered him sitting peacefully in the front seat of his car. The mere fact that a person is in a single vehicle accident does not constitute probable cause for believing he was driving while impaired by a intoxicating substance, or that he had committed any other crime. This is so particularly in light of the fact that witnesses told dispatchers that Plaintiff appeared to be suffering from a seizure, and that information was successfully conveyed to Garcia, Thompson and Goldstein before they encountered Plaintiff.
The police department set out a statement that said it takes all excessive force accusations seriously but does not comment on pending litigation.
Bruce has continued to suffer from seizures, his lawyers say.
