Court: Police not at fault in woman’s death

San Diego police did not violate the rights of a 24-yearold woman who groaned and screamed for help in the back seat of a patrol car but received no medical aid until after she passed out at the police station and fell into a fatal coma, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the son of Aleah Jenkins had no grounds for a lawsuit against the city or the officers because they did not act with “deliberate indifference or unreasonableness” toward Jenkins either before or during the onehour drive to the station.

Police stopped a car with an expired registration tag in November 2018 and then removed Jenkins, a passenger in the back seat, because of a misdemeanor drug warrant, the court said. After being handcuffed and seated in a patrol car, she started groaning and vomiting, and officers asked if she was suffering drug withdrawal, the court said, but she replied that she was pregnant and did not want to go to jail. They canceled a call to paramedics and drove toward the police station.

During the drive, the court said, Jenkins periodically groaned and screamed for help. They kept going but stopped when she fell silent for 10 minutes. Officer Lawrence Durbin told her to stay awake, patted her on the stomach and said she was fine.

When she screamed some more, Durbin called, “Knock it off,” according to the court.

When they arrived at the police station Jenkins was lying face down on the car seat. The officers pulled her up to fingerprint her, gave her water which she agreed to drink, then left her alone for more than 11 minutes. When they returned, she was unconscious and was taken to a hospital, where she died nine days later, the court said.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Jenkins’ young son, said officers should have known Jenkins was overdosing on drugs and needed immediate treatment. But a federal judge dismissed the suit and the appeals court upheld that ruling Monday.

Jenkins “exhibited signs of medical distress but also obscured the seriousness of those signs with statements about being pregnant, not ingesting drugs, and wanting to avoid jail,” Michael Fisher, a judge from the federal appeals court in Philadelphia temporarily assigned to the Ninth Circuit, said in the majority opinion.

He said Durbin and his colleagues had not acted with “objective unreasonableness or objective deliberate indifference” to Jenkins’ health, the legal standard for a suit against police.

Judge Patrick Bumatay joined Fisher’s opinion. In dissent, Judge Paul Watford said a jury should be allowed to decide whether Durbin, in particular, had disregarded obvious signs of Jenkins’ serious medical problems.

Based on the allegations in the lawsuit, and evidence from a police body-camera video, Durbin may have disregarded “obvious signs of Jenkins’ medical distress, evidently because he thought she was faking her symptoms,” Watford said.

If those facts can be proved, Watford said, Durbin, who was assigned to keep watch on her in the patrol car, “was required to summon immediate medical care . ... He instead did nothing, despite objective signs of medical distress that literally cried out for action.”

The family’s lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment. The family could ask the full appeals court to order a new hearing before a larger panel.