Friday’s death of a 56-year-old man while in Davis police custody marked the law-enforcement agency’s second such incident to occur in less than four months.
“To have two in such a close amount of time, it’s very disturbing,” said Davis Police Chief Darren Pytel, whose agency’s only prior in-custody death was a burglar that an officer shot and killed after being fired upon first back in the 1980s.
While officers frequently train to prevent such situations, “we just hadn’t experienced it first-hand,” Pytel said.
Yolo County coroner’s officials identified the man who died Friday as James Kenneth Dugger, a resident of the Pacifico Student Housing Cooperative on Drew Circle, where officers were summoned at 5:40 a.m. to investigate reports of a man running about naked and causing a disturbance.
The initial officers arrived on scene and waited for backup to arrive before approaching Dugger, who was detained without a struggle or any use of force, according to Pytel.
“They really just grabbed his hands and were able to handcuff him,” Pytel said. With potential mental health or drug-related issues at hand, however, police classified the incident as a “medical emergency” and summoned an ambulance to transport Dugger in case any problems arose.
Seated on the ground near a patrol car as they waited for the ambulance to arrive, Dugger “repeatedly tried to get up and was moving around,” Pytel said. The officers tried to verbally calm him and told him to “stop resisting,” but Dugger slumped over and stopped breathing just as the ambulance pulled up.
CPR efforts immediately began and continued at Sutter Davis Hospital, where Dugger was pronounced dead at 7:20 a.m.
Yolo County Chief Deputy Coroner Gina Moya said an autopsy was conducted Friday, but rulings regarding cause of death and the possible involvement of drugs or alcohol will require toxicology testing, which typically takes up to six weeks to complete.
The incident also is being investigated by an outside police agency, in this case the West Sacramento Police Department, with oversight and guidance from the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office. The four involved officers have been placed on paid administrative leave.
Pytel declined to reveal the officers’ names but said one was a corporal with 12 years of law-enforcemet experience, while the others were patrol officers with between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 years on the force. Three of the four have undergone crisis intervention training.
Coroner: Drugs caused prior death
While the possible role of drugs in Friday’s incident remains unknown, investigators say they were a significant factor in the Oct. 15 in-custody death of David Elwood Shurtz Jr., a 54-year-old Sacramento resident.
A Yolo County coroner’s report recently obtained by The Davis Enterprise listed Shurtz’s cause of death as “sudden cardiorespiratory arrest during physical altercation with police officers,” due to excited delirium brought on by acute methamphetamine intoxication.
When he was pronounced dead in Room 204 of the La Quinta Inn & Suites on Research Park Drive, Shurtz had more than six times the potentially lethal level of methamphetamine in his bloodstream — 6,400 nanograms per milliliter, according to the toxicology findings in Deputy Coroner Sheik Ali’s report.
California Department of Justice figures typically put lethal meth levels at 1,000 nanograms per milliliter, though that can vary depending on a person’s state of addiction.
Shurtz’s blood tests also revealed the presence of marijuana, amphetamine and caffeine, and he suffered from obesity and hypertensive cardiovascular disease in addition to chronic methamphetamine addiction, the report says.
Still, he “displayed superhuman strength” when officers confronted him inside the hotel room, tossing officers to the side and withstanding two Taser deployments and multiple baton strikes before police were able to detain him, the coroner’s report says.
Shurtz became unresponsive after being handcuffed and died despite immediate medical intervention.
Earlier that morning, officers had responded to reports of a person screaming and sounds of items breaking inside Shurtz’s second-floor hotel room. As they stood outside the door, a man yelled “she won’t let me out of here” and “she has a gun.”
Concerned for the man’s safety and getting no response to their verbal communications, officers forced their way into the room, where the violent confrontation ensued and resulted in minor injuries to four of the six officers involved.
Police later noted that Shurtz had caused extensive damage to the room prior to their arrival, including smashing the ceramic shower lining and shattering a sink vanity mirror.
Ali, the deputy coroner, ruled out foul play and determined Shurtz’s death to be accidental. The incident was investigated by the Woodland Police Department, which was expected to review the recently released coroner’s report before submitting its findings.
Pytel, however, believes his officers acted appropriately.
“Nobody showed up for a violent situation to occur. They went out there to help a person,” he said. “For a person to die, it was very stressful for the officers. These types of situations are not why we go into law enforcement.”
The coroner’s report indicates Shurtz was estranged from much of his family, and attempts by The Enterprise to reach his relatives were unsuccessful.
‘A really good guy’
Police detectives remained at the Pacifico apartment complex well into the afternoon Friday, documenting the scene while awaiting the arrival of a warrant to search Dugger’s third-floor residence.
Much of the parking lot was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape, outside of which a small group of Dugger’s neighbors had gathered to observe the investigative process.
While none of them wanted to be quoted by name, they described Dugger — who had acquired the nickname “Big Hoss” — as “a really good guy,” an avid Dallas Cowboys fan who had moved into the complex last year and was attending community college in Woodland.
“He was on the right track, getting his life back, getting education,” one woman said of Dugger, reportedly a U.S. Army veteran who may have served in the Middle East. “But he didn’t like the way the world was going, and he didn’t like anybody that put the military down.”
Gesturing toward a red mountain bike locked to a nearby rack, the neighbors said Dugger biked everywhere and had been setting aside money to buy a used car, but had his savings stolen when he was robbed at gunpoint outside the apartment complex the week before his death.
“That really devastated him, because he was working so hard,” one woman said. Asked about the robbery, police said it remains under investigation and no arrests have been made.
One neighbor said she heard the “screaming and yelling” that brought police to the Pacifico apartments Friday morning. At one point, she said, Dugger began shouting, “Help me, help me,” before seeing him placed on a gurney as medical personnel administered chest compressions.
If Dugger had a drug problem, his neighbors said, it wasn’t readily apparent to them.
“He’d bend over backwards to help you,” one said. “He was just a nice man, with a heart of gold.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene
