Lawyer: Death shows more training needed

Over the past three months, the Spokane Police Department has gotten new training on how to deal with the substance-impaired and mentally disabled. Officers are being taught to recognize “excited delirium,” which police describe as a potent mix of extreme mental and physical excitement often fueled by drugs or alcohol that experts say can trigger a medical emergency.

The training teaches officers to calm a hostile or paranoid person, using the lowest levels of force necessary and calling for immediate medical attention.

The training, ordered by Spokane Mayor Dennis Hession and Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick in April, is a response to the death last year of Otto Zehm, a mentally disabled man who died after being Tasered and beaten by Spokane police in a convenience store.

There was intense community outrage at Zehm’s death, which was declared a homicide and is still under investigation by the FBI.

The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office will soon have similar training. All commissioned deputies will be trained starting June 1, Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said Tuesday.

That announcement from the Sheriff’s Office came three days after the death of Trent Yohe. Planning for the training has been “in the works since last fall,” Knezovich said.

Yohe’s death last Saturday following a May 1 fight with sheriff’s deputies is further proof that the training is badly needed, according to Terri Sloyer of the Center for Justice, a Spokane civil rights attorney who attended the Spokane Police Department training sessions.

In their confrontation with Yohe, sheriff’s deputies “violated every protocol” now put in place by the Spokane Police Department, Sloyer said.

The city’s new “excited delirium protocol” discourages hogtying suspects and calls for obtaining immediate medical assistance.

Yohe, a 37-year-old methamphetamine addict, stopped breathing after being Tasered, hogtied and kicked by sheriff’s deputies responding to an anonymous call about drug activity on East Fifth Avenue.

Two of Yohe’s friends say he suffered from grand mal seizures. In a search warrant affidavit, police detectives investigating the incident say Yohe appeared to be having a seizure when sheriff’s deputies entered the trailer on East Fifth.

In his recent presentation at the Spokane police training, Richard Kness, EMS battalion chief of the Spokane Fire Department, said the most important lesson to remember is that excited delirium is “an imminently life-threatening medical emergency, not a crime in progress.”