Amazon Worker Jailed for 7 Hours After Stroke Mistaken for Drunk Driving, Lawsuit Says

The sheriff’s office in Missouri is being sued by a man who was wrongly arrested for DWI while having signs of a stroke. The man was not given the medical care he needed.

Greene County Sheriff’s Deputy Kyle Winchell pulled Paul Espinosa, 54, over as he was driving to work at the Amazon Warehouse in Republic, Missouri. Espinosa said this in a federal court complaint he made in April. Winchell said Espinosa’s car was “weaving,” and the officer thought he might be drunk behind the wheel. The lawsuit says Espinosa agreed to a field sobriety test that included a Breathalyzer test. The test showed that Espinosa had “no trace of alcohol in his system,” with a score of 0.000%.

Espinosa did show signs of “swaying” during other parts of the test, though, and Winchell stopped him on suspicion of DWI. In order to get Espinosa to jail, Winchell put him in the back of his car. Even though the air conditioning was on the whole time, Espinosa started “sweating profusely” during the transport. The claim says that Espinosa’s “motor skills were declining” when they got to the jail.

The lawsuit says that Espinosa’s condition kept getting worse while he was being booked and giving permission for a blood test. As soon as Espinosa got there, he started to lose his balance, his speech got slurred, and he got “confused with simple instructions.” Every one of these symptoms got worse, according to the claim.

Espinosa was put in a holding cell and stayed there until two police officers saw that he was lying down. When a nurse came in and asked Espinosa if he knew what was going on, he is said to have said, “No.” The lawsuit says that she checked his blood pressure and heart rate and said that his pupils were “sluggish and non-reactive.”

He was then left in the waiting cell by himself.

He stayed in jail for seven and a half hours until two a.m., when a booking officer drove him to a nearby hospital in a free car because his health was “unstable.”

Lawyers say that when Espinosa got to the hospital, the person who checked him in lied to the staff, telling them that cops had found him in his car in the parking lot and that they didn’t think he looked right and had trouble talking when they tried to talk to him.

According to the complaint, hospital staff told Espinosa he had a cerebral stroke and quickly took him by ambulance to another hospital for more intensive care.

Because Espinosa didn’t get medical help right away, the lawsuit said, she went blind and “suffers from other impairments.” This was because the Green County Sheriff’s Office “intentionally denied” her.

Espinosa is suing the sheriff’s office for medical neglect and willful disregard for her needs. They want a trial by a jury and money awards to punish the person who hurt them.

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