Man shot at St. Joseph’s files suit
He is suing four officers and the city after 2015 incident in hospital room
When Alan Pean woke up at St. Joseph Medical Center last summer after a psychiatric episode, he says he found himself shot through the chest, handcuffed to his bed and facing felony charges for assaulting two officers who responded to his hospital room.
A grand jury found those charges did not hold weight, and police officers failed to convince a judge to hold him on a third charge of reckless driving en route to the emergency room for treatment.
The case became part of a national debate over whether the increasing use of armed guards in hospitals improves security or endangers patients like Pean, who was unarmed.
Now, Pean, 27, has turned the tables on the people he says had him facing charges last August. On Tuesday, he sued the city of Houston and four city police officers in state district court for unjustifiably using excessive force and then allegedly fabricating a cover-up. He also filed charges of negligence against St. Joseph; Criterion, the hospital’s security company; and Iasis Healthcare Corporation, which owns and operates the medical center.
He is seeking more than $100,000 in damages.
“Not only can you no longer trust the institutions that are supposed to protect you, you aren’t even safe in a place like a hospital,” said Joseph C. Melugin, Pean’s attorney.
Janice Evans, spokeswoman for the city of Houston, said she could not comment on any pending litigation.
The attorney for the hospital and its parent company could not be reached for comment. A call to the executive officer at the security company was not returned.
Pean, now completing his undergraduate degree in New York, said at a briefing at his attorney’s Houston office Tuesday that on Aug. 26, 2015, he was home in Houston studying cell biology, when he realized he was having
a manic episode. All of a sudden, he felt he had the bionic power to morph into President Barack Obama or an Obama look-alike, he recalled. Pean said he had been diagnosed with anxiety and bipolar disorder, but was not on medication. He said he had not had a manic episode in several years. He phoned his brother and his father, a physician in McAllen, and they all agreed he should go to the hospital and get on medication.
Pean decided he could not wait for the friend who was coming to pick him up, so he said he got in the car alone. He hit some parked cars outside St. Joseph downtown and was admitted and kept for observation after what his attorney said was a minor accident.
The following morning, he was expecting to be released. His parents had gone to get a rental car. Pean said he wandered in and out of the room about three times naked, disoriented and confused. He’d just showered and was looking for a towel, he said.
Someone alerted hospital security. Two off-duty uniformed officers, Oscar Ortega and Roggie Law, entered the room and had a physical confrontation with Pean, who was naked and unarmed, the suit states, and in the midst of a mental health crisis. Officer Law tasered him at close range. Ortega shot him in the chest with his duty weapon, missing his vital organs. While Pean lay bleeding on the floor, an officer handcuffed him and somebody threw a drape over his body, the lawsuit states.
By the time Pean’s doctor arrived and convinced police to remove the handcuffs, Pean had lost onethird of his blood, according to his lawsuit. No one had administered aid or treatment, said Pean’s lawyer.
Pean contends the officers should have known he was being treated in a portion of the hospital for people with mental illness.
His suit says two other officers, Steven Murdock and Don Egdorf, facilitated the cover-up to shield their colleagues from scrutiny. Murdock filed two charges of aggravated assault on a public official. Egdorf was preparing to file a DWI charge, according to the suit, but toxicology tests did not bear out that allegation. Four months later, Egdorf filed a misdemeanor charge of reckless driving.
Pean’s suit says the city defends all police officers against civil liability for excessive force, a custom that “allows officers to shoot with impunity” and leads to “deliberate indifference.”
Melugin, Pean’s lawyer, said he hoped the suit would shed light on “the lengths the city of Houston will go to cover up” misdeeds.
The hospital is charged with failing to establish clear policies or provide training for security officers. The company’s negligence includes “sending uniformed police officers — armed with guns, Tasers, and handcuffs — and not supervised or aided by health care professionals, to deal with an unarmed, peaceful person.”
Pean said he is currently in the process of applying to graduate school. He hopes to become an expert in health care administration.