Mother testifies: ‘I just wanted to hold my child’

Lydia Adams said she raced through a hospital hallway toward her son’s lifeless body, but before reaching him was pushed to the floor by a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office investigator.

Adams testified Monday that she was denied a final embrace with her son’s body the night that Seth Adams was gunned down by an undercover sheriff’s office sergeant nearly five years ago.

“She just kind of grabbed me and just threw me,” Lydia Adams, 61, said about the investigator who was photographing her son’s naked body at St. Mary’s Medical Center hours after the shooting. “I said, ‘I just want to hold my child.’ ... She said, ‘This is evidence.’ ”

The encounter at the hospital is one of the concerns Lydia and her husband Richard Adams raise in the excessive force and wrongful death lawsuit filed against the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office and Sgt. Michael Custer — who fired the shots that killed the Adams’ unarmed son.

Custer has said Seth Adams attacked him during an encounter at the Loxahatchee Groves nursery where Adams lived and worked. Custer said he opened fire thinking Adams had reached into a truck for a weapon.

The Adams family attorneys have argued that the location of the blood trail Adams left that night, as well as a smashed bullet and bullet casings fired from Custer’s gun, contradict the officer’s account of where the shooting occurred.

Lydia Adams told jurors Monday that since the shooting, her family has been haunted by what life could be like if Seth was still with them.

She said the pain of his loss has strained her relationship with her husband and created distance with her surviving son. She also says it has kept her from being a grandmother to her two new grandsons who never got to know their uncle. “I used to be so trusting and so open and just free with my emotions,” Lydia Adams said. “I’m just not the same person that I was.”

After being blocked from touching her son’s body when she first arrived at the hospital the night of the shooting, Lydia Adams said she was told she would have some time with him after the evidence collection was complete. Instead, she said the family later watched as a gurney with a body bag got wheeled away and taken to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy.

After three weeks of testimony, the Adams family attorneys rested their case on Monday and attorneys for Custer and the sheriff ’s office called the first witness for the defense.

Capt. Michael Wallace, who oversaw the investigation of the shooting, was asked to explain a chain of emails he was part of after the shooting that referenced an “evil plan.”

Wallace, who responded to the email from another officer, said it was a “poor choice of words.” He said it jokingly referred to an unpopular effort to change schedules within the homicide unit – not to get rid of the cell phone Custer had with him the night of the shooting.

The trial before Senior U.S. District Judge Daniel T. K. Hurley continues Tuesday.