Hayward police and Falck paramedics allegedly failed over and over again while confronting — and later chemically sedating — a local Marine veteran who died in their custody earlier this year, according to a lawsuit filed by the man’s family.
The officers and paramedics’ actions were “negligent” and “objectively unreasonable” during their March 12 encounter with Nathan Hoang, who was tased and tackled before being given a controversial sedative and slipping into a coma, the lawsuit claimed. Hoang, a married father of six, died nine days later in a death that was kept secret for weeks by the Hayward Police Department, until its discovery by the Bay Area News Group.
The incident has further heightened scrutiny of paramedics’ use of midazolam, which also goes by the brand name Versed. The drug is used as a calming agent during some death penalty executions and has been linked to dozens of police in-custody deaths across the United States, including several in the Bay Area.
“It’s like they just hand out Versed willy-nilly, and it’s ridiculous,” said Ben Nisenbaum, who represents Hoang’s relatives who filed the lawsuit. “They inject it if there’s even a possibility that the person later could become difficult. That’s not health care.”
The lawsuit names the city of Hayward, several of its police officers and the Falck ambulance company as defendants. It was quietly filed in federal district court by Hoang’s mother and three of his children in September, and only recently came to the attention of this news organization.
Hayward police Sgt. Matt McMahon said the city would not comment on ongoing litigation. In a statement, Falck spokesman Jeff Lucia said that “Falck stands behind the care our paramedics and EMTs provide every day to the residents of Alameda County.”
The filing centers on Hoang’s mid-March arrest, after a woman called 911 to say he had broken into her house off Virginia Street and was yelling incoherently.
Highly-edited body camera footage later released by the Hayward Police Department showed Hoang running along the roofs of neighboring houses, and officers trying to coax him down. Officers tased him nine times — only succeeding in subduing him after the first eight attempts failed, authorities said.
Hoang, who was holding a screwdriver, was then pinned down by police and handcuffed before being loaded into an ambulance, videos of the encounter show.
A Falck paramedic later injected Hoang with midazolam, after which Hoang yelled that he couldn’t breathe and said something about his heart. He fell unconscious several minutes later, according to court records.
The Alameda County coroner’s bureau later ruled Hoang’s death an accident. A medical examiner listed Hoang’s cause of death as a heart attack, stemming from a combination of methamphetamine use, an enlarged heart and the “blunt force trauma” from the violent struggle with police, according to the coroner’s report.
The lawsuit claimed paramedics “failed to take any precautions to avoid injecting the drug intravenously,” and “failed to conduct a reasonable visual examination” of him prior to sedating him.
Midazolam was the subject of an Associated Press investigation last year that identified 94 instances nationally from 2012 to 2021 where someone died in police custody after being injected with the drug — though it is difficult to extrapolate a single cause of death in people who are often under the influence of narcotics and engaged in stressful physical struggles.
Sixteen of those deaths occurred in California, including incidents in Oakland, San Francisco, Richmond and Pleasanton.
More recently, an Alameda County jury acquitted a man of murder and manslaughter in a 2020 fatal shooting after finding that the shooter acted in self-defense, and that the victim’s death was actually caused by a paramedic’s use of the sedative.
Nathan Hoang — a Marine veteran who was twice deployed to Iraq before receiving an honorable discharge — suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and “delusional episodes” from his time in combat, the lawsuit said. As a result, he was known to enter strangers’ homes in search of relatives whom he thought were in danger, despite being unable to tell “delusion from reality.”
The lawsuit also suggested Hayward police had previously encountered Hoang during other mental breaks he suffered over the last 15 years, and returned him safely home.
Yet in this instance, the family claimed, Hayward police ignored Hoang’s lengthy history of mental illness.
The lawsuit accused the officers of failing to properly de-escalate the situation — instead basing their response on “stereotypes of the disabled rather than an individualized inquiry” of what Hoang needed in that moment.
The lawsuit also claimed Hoang was “forcibly taken down” from a roof during the encounter, either by “measure of force” or with Tasers. Hayward police had previously claimed Hoang had jumped from the roof into a backyard and proceeded to again run from officers.
Hoang’s family wants Hayward’s leaders to release the full, unedited footage captured by officers’ body cameras that day, showing how Hoang got off the roof and how paramedics administered the midazolam. Doing so is critical, Nisenbaum said, to know “exactly what happened, how it happened and who did what.”
“It does not look like – from what we can see – Nathan did anything that is violent,” Nisenbaum said. “So it just doesn’t make sense why he is dead.”
One thing is clear, he added: More training is needed for how police and paramedics approach people suffering from psychotic breaks, along with greater discipline and accountability for first responders who don’t follow that guidance.
“This was obviously a person who required a lot of patience in how to respond to him, as opposed to confrontation. And that didn’t happen here,” Nisenbaum said.
Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com.