Davis death in custody may highlight threat of severe agitation

A man yelling for help from inside a south Davis motel died in police custody early last Thursday morning.

According to the Davis Police Department, officers responded to reports of a male subject screaming at the La Quinta Inn. When officers arrived, they heard a man yell for help, but also make statements that made them think there was a gun and possibly another person in the room. Those two things didn't end up being true, but police wouldn't learn that until later.

After failing to establish communication with anyone inside, officers breached the motel door. The police department says it took six officers to restrain the 54-year-old man they found inside, who “violently resisted being taken into custody.” When they finally gained control, he stopped breathing. Though medical personnel was on the scene, they were unable to revive him and the man died.

The death is in the early stages of being investigated by Woodland police, but, on the surface, it appears similar to a February 4 death in the city of Sacramento, one that highlights the potential risk of encountering people with unseen health conditions.

In the latter case, an officer was alerted around midnight to a man tampering with vehicles near 19th and H streets. The man, identified by the coroner as 49-year-old Thomas Ramirez, grew agitated when a second officer arrived on scene and resisted attempts to be detained. Francine Tournour, director of Sacramento's Office of Public Safety and Accountability, says the two officers were able to wrestle Ramirez to the ground and put him in the back of the cruiser.

At the jail, some 10 blocks away, deputies had to pull the resisting Ramirez out of the car and place him on the ground so they could swap out restraints. It was during this time that Ramirez stopped moving. Deputies flipped him over and began CPR, but Ramirez expired.

Tournour reviewed jail footage of the incident. It looked to her like “excited delirium syndrome,” or ExDS. Take a person with acute psychiatric symptoms and elevated temperature, add stimulants and then add the cops. The end result is a person whose central nervous system spikes into the red zone, then flatlines.

“These patients often die within 1 hour of police involvement,” states a research paper that the FBI posted on its website last year. “One study showed 75 percent of deaths from ExDS occurred at the scene or during transport.”

That’s what happened May 2013, when a 40-something man making unintelligible statements spooked a convenience store employee north of the Florin neighborhood. As the man exited the store to arriving officers, he panicked and ended up attacking one of them. The resulting melee spilled onto the streets, where additional officers and nearby civilians jumped into the scrum. The man was struck repeatedly during the fight, seemingly without effect. It wasn’t until he was taken into custody that he lost consciousness. He later died at a hospital—not from any external injuries, but from what was occurring inside his body.

Severe agitation coupled with aggression are common traits, but exact signs and symptoms can be difficult to detect, even for forensic pathologists, according to an article in the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Sacramento County Coroner Kimberly Gin said an official report on Ramirez's cause of death is still forthcoming.

Tournour has recommended that the Sacramento Police Department adopt a policy of medically clearing suspected ExDS cases before transporting them to jail. It might not save everyone, but she thinks it could help.

Davis police Lt. Paul Doroshov, whose department is handling media attention on the case, said it could take a while before Woodland police investigators finish their investigation. “Generally, another agency comes in and does the criminal aspect of [the investigation] so it’s more objective,” he said. “With these types of cases, they want to go the extra step.”