Placer County pays $10M after paralyzed man shot

SAN FRANCISCO » A Northern California county has paid nearly $10 million to settle a lawsuit by a Silicon Valley software engineer who was having a mental health crisis two years ago when a deputy shot him, paralyzing him from the waist down.

Placer County paid Samuel Kolb, 50, and his family $9.9 million to settle the lawsuit the family filed after a deputy shot him twice on Jan. 14, 2018, inside a North Lake Tahoe rental cabin where Kolb and his teenage son were vacationing, Kolb said.

“There’s a measure of relief in not having to go through this and not having to put my family through any more legal challenges. But I would trade all the money plus interest to have my old life back, to not have gone through this and put my family through this, to have full use of my body. No amount of money makes up for that,” Kolb said.

Kolb and his son had traveled from their home in San Mateo for a ski trip in Lake Tahoe and were staying at a cabin in Carnelian Bay when Kolb woke up before dawn and began pacing around the cabin.

He woke up his then 16-year- old son and asked him to get medical help, Ronald Kaye, the Kolbs’ attorney, said in the federal lawsuit he filed to dismiss Monday. A federal court Tuesday granted the stipulation for dismissal.

Kolb’s son called 911 and reported his father was acting odd and was “in a dream-like state,” according to court documents.

He told the dispatcher his father had a history of temporal lobe epilepsy and that they had smoked marijuana together before going to bed.

Temporal lobe epilepsy can cause people to feel a sudden sense of fear or anxiety, anger or sadness, though a lawsuit filed by Kaye said Kolb had not had a similar incident in about 15 years.

Kolb’s son “did not believe, nor did he represent, that his father presented any danger to his safety — he simply requested medical help as he observed his father suffering from a mental health episode,” Kaye said in court documents.

When Placer County Deputy Curtis Honeycutt arrived, he found Kolb and his son standing outside the cabin in the cold. Kolb was only wearing a short-sleeved shirt and pajama bottoms and Honeycutt instructed them to go back inside instead of securing Kolb in the back of the patrol car to await mental health intervention, the lawsuit said.