Man who suffered seizure while driving claims police brutality

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Jack Bruce, an East Bay tradesman, was driving home from visiting his grandmother this past April when he suffered a seizure that caused him to lose control of his car, veer off the side of the road and crash into some trees in the Bay Area city of Hercules.

Two bystanders called 911, telling dispatchers Bruce appeared to be having a seizure.

Hercules police officers Angel Garcia, Michael Thompson and Joshua Goldstein responded to the scene. Body camera footage shows that Bruce appeared confused and fell asleep while the police questioned him. But instead of helping him, the officers yanked him out of the car, shot him with a Taser, punched him in the face and filed sham criminal charges against him that were later dropped, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed Friday morning in San Francisco against Hercules and the officers.

Bruce says the officers violated procedures and ignored their training and common medical practices when they decided to forcibly remove him from his car and assaulted him.

The California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) advises officers not to restrain seizure victims and warns officers that “agitated behavior during an episode should not be perceived as deliberate hostility or resistance to the officer.”

“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. Ignoring this training, they repeatedly poked, prodded, shook, and yelled at plaintiff, ordering him to leave his car,” Bruce says in his complaint. “When that did not work, because plaintiff had not yet recovered the ability to understand what was happening around him, they escalated, and began to forcefully extract him from the car.”

The after-effects of the seizure caused Bruce to resist the efforts of the officers to remove him from his car, which enraged the officers, he says.

“As the officers began to forcefully extract him from his car, plaintiff repeatedly asked, ‘What are you doing?’ Defendants did not relent. Garcia grabbed plaintiff by the neck, angrily screamed ‘get out of the car,’ and cursed at plaintiff repeatedly. In an even more shocking display of unprofessional conduct, Thompson, who had been there at most two minutes, angrily barked, ‘Do not fucking fight us. You will fucking get ripped out of this car. We’re not playing. Get the fuck up,’” Bruce says in his complaint.

After the instructions failed to have any effect on Bruce, who was still suffering from the seizure, Garcia tased Bruce while Thompson dragged him out of the car by his limbs and hair. Once out of the car, Bruce claims Garcia tased him two more times.

In the body camera footage, Thompson acknowledges punching Bruce in the face two times, lacerating his lip, because Bruce kicked him, although body camera footage does not show any kick.

After removing Bruce, the officers searched the car, with Thomson and Garcia saying they believed Bruce was high.

“He’s high as fuck on something, I just don’t know what it is,” Garcia said according to the body camera footage, before muting his camera for the final 12 minutes of the recording. Garcia never explained why he silenced his camera in his incident report, which Bruce claims is a violation of Hercules Police Department policy.

The officers ultimately found no drugs in the car, but filed criminal charges against Bruce anyway which were later thrown out, Bruce says. At a hospital in Martinez, Bruce was diagnosed with epilepsy and blood tests showed he was sober at the time of the crash.

Bruce seeks compensation for physical pain and suffering, special damages for medical care and punitive damages against the officers.

He is represented by David Fiol, a San Rafael attorney who also represented Bay Area resident Bruce Frankel who police shot with a Taser in his bedroom after suffering a seizure last year. Frankel said those officers filed sham criminal charges against him to justify their conduct.

“Police officers are trained that the treatment for seizure victims is simple: give them time to recover. The three defendants knew this — indeed they discussed the need to ‘just let him be’ when they first arrived. It boggles the mind that only four minutes later they were pulling, poking, punching and tasing him, and then blaming him for the whole thing. This has to stop," Fiol said in a statement.