Jama’alian Jackson needed to be taken away by the nurse when paramedics came.
The officer who was 43 years old had a lot of cops around him, who detained and took him after receiving a call about the case in a Wisconsin parking area. The cops used a Taser on him and then kept him on the ground saying he can’t breathe, given the circumstances. There he was on his knees with hands receiving punishment by handcuffs, and exhaling the breath through a bag.
In the next step, next, they turned Jackson sideways so he could get knocked out by the injecting medic with a highly potent anesthetic.
“But it will only fix things up,” the officer was trying to explain. It took about five minutes for his heart to stop beating. He never came to and he passed away two weeks proceeding his collapse.
A thorough investigation focused by The Associated Press into these deaths found that at least 94 of those who passed occurred after they had been given sedatives, and were restrained by police officers from 2012 till 2021. Most of the inmates were Black. Demetrio Jackson who was Black was the most victim of them. His story was revealed.(AP Video: Shelby Lum)
Jackson’s 2021 death illustrates an often-hidden way fatal U.S. police encounters end: toxic chemicals did not emit in a cloud of stench coming from the barrel of an officer’s gun but were injected into the person’s body with the use of a quiet syringe.
The procedure for drug-induced calm in people detained by police has come without anyone noticing, this little secret has been commonplace across the nation in the past fifteen years according to the investigation conducted by the Associated Press as it is supported by police-associated specialists and a shaky scientific basis. Among thousands of file pages of police and medical records, disputed videos of numerous events, and a thorough investigation show that a strategy that, amongst other things, was meant to reduce violence and save lives sometimes leads to unnecessary deaths.
It is noted that about 94 people died during this time period after they were put on sedation and tied to restraints by agencies including police. It is data from the activities of the American Press (AP), in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative JournalismThat’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black, including Jackson.
LETHAL RESTRAINT INVESTIGATION
Statistically, even after the police officers have overpowered them, a lot of people have died, but unlike with happenings, only a few American citizens are cognizant.
– An AP review revealed that in the course of ten years over a thousand people had been killed following the police’s physical force which implies inhalation/bites or similar methods that are not meant to cause deaths. We invite you to go through the judgment collection in its entirety at this designated link.
– A dented and worn-out 911 was called by a mother to secure mental health treatment for her son. He passed away upon police having him down, followed by a medic administering a strong sedative.
At its core, however, there are some considered medical conditions such as excited delirium that was generally responsible for sedation’s accessibility to people outside of the hospital setting. Some oppose it on the grounds that its alleged symptoms like “superhuman strength” and high pain threshold possibly build on stereotypes of black people and may also lead to biased judgments about who needs sedation, which is the main objection.
The fact that after 50 % of these cases the administration of such heavier drugs like sedatives has never been taken into account is one of the reasons why attention is drawn in most cases to the behavior of the police, not the medics. Elijah McClain’s 2019 death in Aurora, Colorado, was a rare exception: Not only that but two paramedics were also sentenced to sedation of McClian by an amount of ketamine excessive enough to have been given as a drug to Jackson. A fifth defendant was sentenced to five years in prison last month and another will serve 14 months in jail and also spend time in probation.
Obviously, no conclusion could be succinctly drawn on whether or not the role of sedatives might have caused the 94 deaths, and many of these deaths involved the addition of other potentially unsafe force LSD and whatever other possible type of risk that could come up. The experts said in another news article that medical experts said that their impact might be negligible in the light of the death of people already dying; the last straw that induced breathing and heart failure in the sick; and the main cause of death when misused.
While sedatives were mentioned as a cause or contributing factor in a dozen official death rulings, authorities often didn’t even investigate whether injections were appropriate. Medical officials have traditionally viewed them as mostly benign treatments. Now some say they may be playing a bigger role than previously understood and deserve more scrutiny.
Time and time again, the AP found, agitated people who were held by police facedown, often handcuffed and with officers pushing on their backs, struggled to breathe and tried to get free. Citing combativeness, paramedics administered sedatives, further slowing their breathing. Cardiac and respiratory arrest often occurred within minutes.
The medics would use drugs to subdue some people who were no threat to themselves or others, a behavior that is pegged as going against treatment ethics and guidelines. Medics usually weren’t entirely clear what other drugs or alcohol were in people’s bloodstream with some mixtures triggering severe effects.
Officers sometimes give paramedics hypodermic syrettes to inject the detained suspects in the beyond of the job.
Occasionally, they wittily noted the powerful effects of the drugs upon their experimental recipients’ consciousness. “Night, night” can be heard fleetingly before death in California, Tennessee, and Florida videos.
Certainly, often in order to protect themselves from harm at the hands of aggressors, for instance, doctors may end up becoming extensions of the patrolman, his weapons, and the nightstick. Claire Zagorski, a paramedic and a former addiction doctor confirmed this.
Advocates indicate that drug-induced sedation helps solve behavioral issues that result from drug intake and enables speedy treatment of psychotic episodes; it also protects the first-line responders from violent attacks; police officers report that they have safely deployed the therapy on many occasions to save lives of individuals who suffer from life-threatening conditions. Taking an opposing viewpoint is supported, hence, the sufficient use of force sedation should be forbidden or at least tightly prohibited. This comes from the problem of comparing the potency of the drugs and obtaining results with the psychological status of the patient.
Ohio State University professor Dr. Mark DeBard was one of the early pioneers of sedation, who was a conviction that it could be implemented non-routinely when confronted by inflamed individuals who needed urgent medical intervention. Here he said he still witnesses officers under-using the medical services for those emergencies, handling them as physical confrontations. Interestingly, the policeman claims that paramedics have administered unwanted injections due to their obsession with labeling the situation as excited delirium.
However, other critics argue that the research was not well planned from the beginning by sedative and police charber, which is a dangerous thing. Families have lots of tears from the west to the coast as a result of the bodies.
“They’re running around on the streets administering these heavy-duty medications that could be lethal,” said Honey Gutzalenko, a nurse whose husband died after he was injected with midazolam in 2021 while restrained by police near San Francisco. “It’s just not right.”
‘I’M BEGGING YOU TO STOP’
Jackson was standing on a truck outside a radio station on the border of the small Wisconsin cities of Eau Claire and Altoona. An employee called 911 before dawn on Oct. 8, 2021, hoping officers could shoo away a stranger who “doesn’t seem to be a threat, but not normal either.”
Police video and hundreds of pages of law enforcement and medical records show how the incident escalated.
An Altoona police officer met Jackson in the parking lot. Jackson appeared uneasy and paranoid, looking around and talking softly. He had taken methamphetamine, which a psychiatrist said he used to self-medicate for schizophrenia. He’d been in and out of jail and living on the streets, with frequent visits to the emergency room seeking a place to rest.
The officer, joined by a second Altoona officer and a sheriff’s deputy, told him he could leave if he gave his name. Jackson refused.
Police identified him through his tattoos, learning he was on probation for meth possession. They noticed the truck had minor damage and decided to arrest him.
Jackson took off running. The officers chased Jackson, who stopped seconds later and staggered toward the first officer. Body-camera video shows she fired her Taser, its darts striking Jackson in the stomach and thigh. He screamed after the electrical shock and collapsed.
When officers couldn’t handcuff Jackson, she fired additional darts, striking Jackson in the back as he lay on the ground. Officers from the Eau Claire Police Department forced Jackson onto his stomach to be handcuffed and restrained him in what’s known as the prone position.
“I’m begging you to stop,” Jackson said. “I can’t breathe.”
After a couple of minutes, officers moved him to his side and then sat him up, trying to improve his breathing.
An officer wondered aloud whether Jackson had “excited delirium” and asked a colleague if paramedics were “going to stand around and do nothing.” He voiced approval when one arrived with ketamine, adding Jackson would not like it “when he gets poked.”
The Eau Claire Fire Department’s excited delirium protocol advises, “Rapid sedation is the key to de-escalation!!!!!” The medic measured 400 milligrams after estimating the 6-foot-tall Jackson weighed 175 pounds, enough to immobilize someone within minutes. He injected the medicine into Jackson’s buttocks.
Five medical experts who reviewed the case for AP said Jackson’s behavior did not appear to be dangerous enough to justify the intervention.
“I don’t believe he was a candidate for ketamine,” said Connecticut paramedic Peter Canning, who said he supports sedating truly violent patients because they stop fighting and are sleeping by the time they get to the hospital.
Minutes later, Jackson stopped breathing on the way to Sacred Heart Hospital. He’d suffered cardiac arrest and, after he was resuscitated, had no brain function.
Jackson’s mother, Rita Gowens, collapsed while shopping at an Indiana Walmart when she learned her oldest son was hospitalized and not expected to survive.
Gowens rushed to the hospital 500 miles away, where she was told he’d been injected with ketamine. She searched online and was stunned to read it’s used to tranquilize horses.
Gowens spoke to Jackson, held his hand and hoped for a miracle. She eventually agreed to remove him from a ventilator after his condition didn’t improve, singing into his ear as he took his final breaths: “You’ve never lost a battle, and I know, I know, you never will.”
She still has nightmares about how police and medics treated her son, whom she recalls as a happy boy with chunky cheeks that inspired the nickname “Meatball.” There are few days when she doesn’t ask, “Why did they give him an animal tranquilizer?”
KETAMINE MOVES TO THE STREETS
The practice of using ketamine to subdue people outside hospitals began in 2004 when a disturbed man scaled a fence, cut himself with a broken bottle and paced along a narrow strip of concrete on a Minneapolis highway bridge.
The man was in danger of falling into traffic below when officers reached through the fence and grabbed him.
Dr. John Hick, who worked with first responders, heard the emergency radio chatter while driving and rushed to the scene with an idea. Hick gave the man two shots of ketamine, started an IV and kept him breathing with an air mask.
The man stopped struggling, and responders lowered him to safety.
Paramedics had occasionally used other sedatives to calm combative people since the 1980s. Hick and his Hennepin County Medical Center colleague Dr. Jeffrey Ho believed ketamine worked faster and had fewer side effects, showing promise to avert fatal police encounters.
Ho was a leading researcher on Taser safety and an expert witness for the company in wrongful death lawsuits. In a 2007 deposition in one such case, he argued for a potentially “life-saving tactic” of having sedative injections quickly follow Taser shocks, saying the combination could shorten struggles that, if prolonged, might end in death.
One of his colleagues at the Heath clinic in Minneapolis told him of a “psychedelic drug, a ketamine analog to LSD. “It is like an animal sedative, after a certain dose it seems to take off all the pain for a while.”
The drug’s use extended from within the hospitals to on the paramedic patrols in 2008 when Hennepin County paramedics were allowed to use it.
In the 2009 article of the American College of Emergency Physicians panel that included him, Ho is quoted as saying ketamine is proven to have “excellent results and safety,” although he added no studies so far are particularly designed to prove that it could save lives.
In time, this made its widespread use in everything apart from the strip of Las Vegas to the City of Columbus in Ohio to the County of Palm Beach in Florida. From AP journalists’ investigation the earliest related death to ketamine came in 2015, of 34-year-old man Juan Carrizales, when he was injected after struggling with police in the Dallas suburb of Garland, TX.
Shortly after ketamine became authorized for such use in Arizona in 2017, deputies who were restraining David Cutler facedown in handcuffs in the scorching desert asked a paramedic to sedate him.
The medic testified he was surprised when Cutler stopped breathing, although the dose was larger than recommended for someone weighing 132 pounds. He said he had been trained that ketamine didn’t impact respiration. Cutler’s death was ruled an accident due to heat exposure and LSD — though that was disputed by experts hired by Cutler’s family, who said heat stroke along with ketamine caused his death.
In Minneapolis, an oversight agency found the use of ketamine during police calls rose dramatically from 2012 through 2017 and body-camera video showed instances of officers appearing to pressure paramedics to use ketamine and joking about its power. The department told officers they could never “suggest or demand” the use of sedation.
Facing criticism, Hennepin Healthcare halted a study examining the effectiveness of ketamine on agitated patients. The Food and Drug Administration later found the research failed to protect vulnerable, intoxicated people who had not given consent.
By 2021, the American College of Emergency Physicians warned ketamine impacted breathing and the heart more than previously believed.
“Ketamine is not as benign as we might have hoped it to be,” a co-author of the new position, Dr. Jeffrey Goodloe, said on the group’s podcast in 2022.
He said the practice of giving large doses of ketamine, sometimes too much for smaller patients, had spread nationwide as agencies copied each other’s protocols with little independent review.
But the AP’s findings show risks of sedation go beyond ketamine, which was used in at least 19 cases.
Roughly half of the 94 deaths documented by the AP came after the use of midazolam, which has long been known to heighten the risk of respiratory depression. Many came during police encounters in California, where ketamine is not widely used. Midazolam, a common pre-surgery drug known by the brand name Versed, is also part of a three-drug cocktail used in some states to execute prisoners.
Other cases involved a range of other drugs, including the antipsychotic medications haloperidol and ziprasidone, which can cause irregular heartbeats.
The need for monitoring side effects is often laid out for paramedics in written guidelines, many of which are based on the disputed belief that excited delirium can cause sudden death.
THE HISTORY OF ‘EXCITED DELIRIUM’
The theory of excited delirium was critically questioned in the initial stages.
In the 1980s, as heated debate rages over the soaring use of cocaine and related violent episodes, a Miami forensic pathologist, Dr. Charles Wetli was the first to explain what he called the syndrome in a handful of deaths of violent cocaine users, many of whom had been restrained by police. Through autopsies and toxicology reports, gets his name struck once again. Wetli, who died in 2020, blamed excited delirium for the sudden and unexplained deaths of more than a dozen Black women as well. He said that he had a successive experience of cocaine addiction and vigorous sex. Both of them were haunting bulls that uncovered this incident.
The number of dead women was later recognized as that of a serial killer. Wetli’s theory survived. Hence, after a while, other symptoms supplemented by Wetli and his contemporaries – such as super strength, animal-like noises, and tolerance to pain – were given unequally to Black people. The jargon infected police and paramedic services as illustrated by several distraught individuals who were face-slammed and later died due to it.
By the middle of 2000 drug usage had gone high and police confronted it. As psychiatric hospitals stopped working the people who were mentally ill came into touch with police. Violence Intervention being a detrimental factor, departments resisted and trusted Tasers as a less-lethal weapon against firearms. There were hundreds of deaths after the violence intervention was removed.
Michael Scott Wetli’s findings relating to excited delirium death were confirmed unequivocally by the Miami-Dade County medical examiner and others. It was never questioned that the weapon and other physical force could not be the reason for those deaths, always a sole cause- pain delirium. Officials at the manufacturer, meanwhile, were “on board,” even advocating for the concept of excited delirium among medical examiners across the country as well as using the experts who have the capability to explain the term to the juries in the wrongful death lawsuits.
In 2006, a grand jury that investigated Taser-related deaths in Miami-Dade recommended an untested treatment that it said could save people before they died from excited delirium: injecting the midazolam into their nose back of the throat, which creates an “almost immediate state of sedation.” Its report noted that “their breathing could become difficult” so Miami-Dade paramedics adopted this procedure.
But key medical groups didn’t recognize excited delirium, and activists were calling for limits on Taser use. What happened next would help promote sedation alongside Tasers as tools to gain control.
In 2008, the biggest names in excited delirium research gathered at a Las Vegas hotel for a three-day meeting organized by a group with ties to Taser’s manufacturer.
“A lot of talk took place on chemical sedation because the cops didn’t know what to do with these people,” recalled John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, which sponsored the meeting. “Jeff Ho had done some work up in Minnesota. He said, ‘Look. I’ve been using ketamine. It knocks them out quicker.’”
The timing was fortuitous: The American College of Emergency Physicians would soon form a task force to study excited delirium and how police and medics should respond.
The 19-member panel included Ho, who became Taser’s medical director under an arrangement in which the company paid part of his hospital salary; Dr. Donald Dawes, a Taser research consultant; and University of Miami researcher Deborah Mash, who testified for Taser about several deaths she blamed on excited delirium. At least two other panelists were routinely retained by officers and their departments as expert witnesses.
The panel’s 2009 paper disclosed none of these relationships. It found excited delirium was real, could result in death regardless of whether someone was shocked with a Taser and called for “aggressive chemical sedation” to treat the symptoms.
DeBard, the now-retired Ohio doctor who chaired the panel, told AP he recruited relevant experts to join and that disclosure of conflicts wasn’t required by the ER doctors group then. He said Taser didn’t influence the outcome, which reflected the panel’s consensus. Mash said she had no conflict because Taser didn’t fund her research. Dawes declined an interview request. Ho didn’t return messages.
Taser rebranded itself in 2017 as Axon. A spokesperson for the company declined interview requests and did not respond to written questions.
Dr. Brooks Walsh, an emergency physician in Connecticut who was not on the panel, said the 2009 paper reinforced racial bias as it formalized “loaded terms” used to describe excited delirium, influencing how the diagnosis would be applied.
Ho and other Taser- and police-aligned experts joined a federally sponsored panel in 2011 that built on the work, recommending four actions on a checklist for officers and paramedics: Identify excited delirium symptoms; control (with a Taser if necessary); sedate; and transport to a hospital.
No test measures for excited delirium, so paramedics faced a judgment call: Which patients were so agitated, strong, impervious to pain and dangerous that they needed to be sedated?
DeBard said the symptoms were based on medical observations, not race. “If you’ve got somebody that’s delirious, irrational, aggressive, hyperactive, running around naked, I mean, it’s really pretty easy” to recognize, he said.
Yet, over time, prominent medical groups and some experts pointed to overuse of sedation during police encounters and a disproportionate impact on Black people. Even supporters of the practice have acknowledged that the wrong patients at times have been injected.
The deaths of Black men in police custody, including the 2020 killing of George Floyd, put pressure on the medical community to re-examine excited delirium. The ER doctors group in 2023 withdrew approval of the 2009 paper and said excited delirium shouldn’t be used in court testimony. Some doctors called that decision political and note the group still recognizes a similar condition — hyperactive delirium with severe agitation — that can be treated with sedation. But today no major medical association legitimizes excited delirium.
‘CONVENIENT FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT’
There were at least 16 cases that AP examined, and each time, the authorities either requested or advised the use of sedatives. This raises doubts about the real duty of the paramedics: was it in favor of law enforcement or that of patients? Many times, officers were observed to touch on the crimes the suspects they apprehended were insane.
The University of California, Berkeley, law and bioethics professor Osagie Obasogie who studies excited delirium and sedation thinks that the medical staff which is present at the scene of the incident should be the only ones to make the decision regarding the sedation of the suspect.
“It is the duty of us that the trusted prisoners are not just being given chemical restraint just because it’s convenient for the officers,” he responded.
Cops are instructed not to give medical advice but some of the wrong people, “knuckleheads” among them, still preach tasers, pistol shots, and such treatment methods, said Peters, who hosted the 2008 meetup in Las Vegas where excited delirium was on the table.
Paramedics say that they carry out medical services independently of police without resorting to the use of sedatives only when it is necessary from the safety point of view in line with guidelines since the sedation may be too powerful for the person. However, in a few examples where AP reported, they had indeed been injected when they had quieted down or even passed out after struggles with police officers.
Ivan Gutatelanko, 47 years old and father, was gasping for breath with two officers pinned him to the pavement in Richmond, California. The bodycam video shows that Gutzalenko was saying that they were hurting him, and he tried to get one of the officers off his back.
A paramedic interpreted Gutzalnao’s action as a direct threat and went for a 5-mg vial of midazolam from an ambulance. When he came back and checked on Gutzalenko, who remained still, she could hardly breathe. “He’s playing pretend he’s unconscious.” One of the officers said.
The syringe penetrated the back of his arm. Gutzalenko’s heart stopped. He, however, died at the hospital. The pathologist declared that midazolam was used on him to “quell him down” during an episode of excited delirium, though he still ruled out the drug’s contribution to his death at that time, which he considers were caused by prone restraint and meth use.
His wife said Gutzalenko, a former critical care nurse, would never have consented to receive midazolam that day.
“I know from being a registered nurse since 2004, you don’t administer a sedative to someone who is clearly already in respiratory distress,” she said, adding that his death has been devastating to their two teenage children.
Dr. Gail Van Norman, a University of Washington professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine, said it’s dangerous for officers to put pressure on the backs and necks of detainees before and after they’re injected with sedatives.
“It’s a recipe for disaster, because you may have created a situation in which you are impeding a person’s ability to get oxygen,” she said.
The AP investigation found half who died following sedation had been shocked with a Taser and the majority had been restrained facedown.
Their blood acid levels may already have been spiking from drugs, adrenaline and pain while oxygen levels may have been plummeting — life-threatening conditions called acidosis and hypoxia.
Sedatives can dull the instinct to compensate by breathing quickly and heavily to blow off carbon dioxide, essential for the heart to beat, said Dr. Christopher Stephens, a UTHealth Houston anesthesiologist and former paramedic.
Under sedation, he said, the body doesn’t respond as efficiently to the buildup of carbon dioxide. “Your brain doesn’t care as much about it,” Stephens said. “And they can go into respiratory and cardiac arrest.”
Paramedics usually have no idea whether their patients have alcohol, opioids or other depressants in their bodies that increase sedatives’ effects on breathing.
More than a dozen who died had been drinking, including Jerica LaCour, 29, a Colorado Springs, Colorado, mother of five young children.
She was stressed about family finances, husband Anthony LaCour recalled, when deputies found her trespassing at a trucking company.
“Guess who gets ketamine?” paramedic Jason Poulson of AMR, the nation’s largest ambulance company, said as LaCour was restrained on a gurney, according to body-camera footage.
An EMT said in a report that she told Poulson that LaCour had calmed and didn’t need ketamine, and later warned that LaCour was no longer breathing. In a disciplinary agreement with state regulators, Poulson admitted he was unsuccessful in protecting LaCour’s airway despite multiple attempts, mishandled the syringe and failed to document the ketamine use properly. His state certification was put on probation.
AMR and Poulson denied responsibility for LaCour’s death in court filings, arguing LaCour was experiencing excited delirium and ketamine was appropriate. This week they settled a long-pending wrongful death lawsuit, LaCour family attorney Daniel Kay said Friday. He said the settlement amount was confidential and the proceeds would help her children. AMR didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and a man who answered a cellphone number listed for Poulson hung up on a reporter.
AFTER DEATH, SEDATION GOES UNQUESTIONED
When people died, the use of sedation often went unacknowledged publicly and unquestioned by investigators.
After Jackson’s death in Wisconsin, police press releases said nothing about ketamine. State police redacted mention of the drug from investigation records and blurred video of the prone restraint and injection, saying his family’s privacy outweighed the public interest in disclosure.
The fire department, which declined comment, blacked out the information in its incident report. But when AP uploaded the document, redactions disappeared, revealing Jackson was given 400 milligrams of ketamine.
An autopsy concluded Jackson died from complications caused by meth. The report said Jackson’s ketamine dose was 100 milligrams, a quarter of what the fire department report said.
Two longtime forensic pathologists who reviewed the case for AP said meth use wasn’t the only factor. Dr. Joye Carter said she believed the police altercation and ketamine caused the death, saying the sedative can cause heart problems when given to a meth user.
Dr. Victor Weedn said the level of meth in Jackson’s blood was high but generally not lethal. He said Jackson likely died from high blood acid levels, with police restraint and possibly ketamine contributing.
The autopsy was performed in Ramsey County, Minnesota. A county spokesperson defended the findings from a now-retired medical examiner, saying the discrepancy on the ketamine dose wasn’t significant.
Citing the autopsy’s finding that meth was the cause, Eau Claire County District Attorney Peter Rindal ruled Jackson’s case was not an “officer-involved death” under Wisconsin law and closed the investigation.
In nearly 90% of the deaths examined by AP, coroners and medical examiners did not list sedation as a cause or contributing factor. Some autopsy reports failed to document that the deceased had been sedated.
The most common ruling was an accidental death in which other drugs, often meth or cocaine, were causes or contributing factors. More than a quarter were at least partially attributed to excited delirium.
Medical examiners view sedatives as safe treatments to control patients and wouldn’t question their use unless there was a grievous error, said Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner of Connecticut and past president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.
“Generally we’re going to default then back to what’s the underlying disease or injury that started this chain of events,” Gill said.
He said sedatives rarely cause deaths by themselves but additional studies could look at whether they play a role in fatal police struggles where many factors are involved.
Even when autopsies implicated sedatives, investigations didn’t always follow.
In LaCour’s case, the coroner found she died from “respiratory arrest associated with acute alcohol and ketamine intoxication.” The district attorney’s office said it had no record of reviewing her death.
Nine miles from LaCour’s injection, a paramedic injected 26-year-old Hunter Barr with ketamine as officers held him facedown in the dirt outside his Colorado Springs home in September 2020.
Retired postal worker Mark Barr had called 911 for help controlling his son, who he said wasn’t violent but was having a bad reaction to LSD. He watched as a medic gave two injections just minutes apart. He said he couldn’t figure out why the second injection was necessary, saying his son was subdued. Hunter Barr became unconscious on the way to a hospital and died within hours.
The coroner ruled Barr died from the effects of ketamine. The Colorado Springs Police Department closed the case as “non-criminal” and the DA’s office again had no review.
When deaths were investigated, inquiries usually focused on whether police used excessive force. In audio and video reviewed by AP, investigators seemed uninterested in how sedation may have contributed.
“I’m not trying to get in the weeds with a whole bunch of that,” an investigator told a paramedic explaining the ketamine injection he gave 18-year-old Giovani Berne before Berne’s heart stopped in Palm Bay, Florida, in 2016.
Berne’s sister, Christina, said the family didn’t know he had been given ketamine until contacted by AP years later, but “we knew something bad happened in the ambulance.” A medical examiner ruled that Berne died of excited delirium.
The death of McClain, 23, in Colorado is the only one that resulted in charges against paramedics. Prosecutors argued Aurora paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec didn’t assess McClain, gave him too much ketamine for someone his size and didn’t monitor him afterward.
Their convictions shook the EMS field, whose leaders say treatment mistakes shouldn’t be criminalized. Defense attorneys argued the paramedics followed their training on excited delirium and ketamine. A judge gave Cichuniec five years in prison while Cooper was sentenced Friday to 14 months in jail and probation.
Civil liability is also rare, in part because deaths have multiple causes and some courts have ruled that unwilling injections aren’t excessive force even when they cause harm. That hasn’t stopped families from trying: A number of wrongful death lawsuits involving sedation are pending.
Lawmakers in Colorado banned excited delirium as a justification for using ketamine and put other restrictions on the drug, but changes in the law elsewhere have been few.
Paramedic reformers are working to address the failures that increase the risk of sedatives contributing to deaths.
Paramedic Eric Jaeger helped rewrite New Hampshire’s protocols and, at a fire station in Hooksett, recently used Jackson’s death as a training scenario after evaluating the case for AP. He questioned whether sedation was necessary. He said medics failed to thoroughly evaluate Jackson and should have had monitoring equipment ready before any injection.
He said he had been aware of a handful of deaths but the number found by AP “dramatically increases” the scope.
“If we don’t change the training, change the protocols, change the leadership to make the system safer,” Jaeger said, “then we all bear responsibility for future deaths.”
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Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
___ The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. Also, the AP Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
— This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs and FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes the Lethal Restraint interactive story, database and the documentary, “Documenting Police Use Of Force,” premiering April 30 on PBS.
— This story has been corrected to reflect that Claire Zagorski is a former paramedic instead of a paramedic
