HAYWARD — Cynthia Fernandez has had plenty of time over the past month to reflect on the 16 years she knew her ex-husband and father of her son, Nathan Hoang, and to ponder exactly what happened the morning he was killed.
“He was such a good man. Nathan had a huge heart. He cared for people, he was kind. He was always for doing the right thing,” Fernandez said in an interview, before addressing the circumstances around his death. “Even in that situation, it’s like, that wasn’t him. That was his mental illness.”
Hoang, a 41-year-old Hayward native, died nine days after a paramedic injected him with a controversial sedative that has been linked to other fatalities, after a struggled with Hayward police on March 12. He had reportedly shown up to a home in search of his children — something his ex-wife says was a common reaction to psychosis — and wrestled with officers until being tased, handcuffed and placed on a gurney.
Minutes after a paramedic injected him with a syringe of midazolam, Hoang went unresponsive and was rushed to a hospital, where doctors declared him brain dead. His death was kept a secret from the public, until the Bay Area News Group uncovered it.
The decision not to disclose what had happened, Hayward’s police chief said in a statement this week, was due to the “sensitive” nature of the investigation.
But one thing that has been missing thus far is a look at Hoang’s life — and how he came to be on Virginia Street in Hayward that night.
“We want people to know who Nathan was,” Fernandez said. “He was a Marine who suffers from PTSD and he was having a mental breakdown.”
Hoang, who leaves behind six children, grew up in Hayward and enlisted into the U.S. Marine Corps practically out of high school, at age 19. The year was 2001, when the country was gearing up for two wars in the Middle East. Hoang soon found himself among the tens of thousands of soldiers stationed overseas.
He returned from two combat tours in Iraq a changed man, Fernandez said.
“The war took a toll on him,” she said. “I wish I would have asked him for stories. He never shared anything in detail with me. I know he lost a lot of buddies out there.”
Other fellow soldiers he knew died by suicide after returning home, she said.
Hoang was given an honorable discharge for disabilities, due to his post traumatic stress disorder. Back in the Bay Area, he and Fernandez met, fell in love, got married and had a child.
“For my son, this is a huge loss. Not only did he lose his father but the way that he lost his father,” Fernandez said. “(Hoang) was a wonderful man, wonderful father to all his kids.”
Hoang’s death remains under investigation. Police have placed a hold preventing the coroner from releasing information, but the police report says Hoang was animated until eight minutes after a Falck ambulance employee injected him with midazolam. Hoang then yelled that he couldn’t breathe, and became unresponsive seven minutes later, according to authorities.
Sold under the brand name Versed, midazolam was the subject of an Associated Press investigation last year that identified 94 instances across the United States — from 2012 to 2021 — where a person died in police custody after being injected with it. Sixteen of those deaths occurred in California, including in Oakland, Richmond, Pleasanton and San Francisco.
The role sedatives may have played in each of the 94 deaths was impossible to determine, the AP reported. Medical experts told the AP that the drug’s impact could be negligible in people who already were dying — the final straw that triggered heart or breathing failure in the medically distressed — or the main cause of death when given in the wrong circumstances or mishandled.
Hayward police Chief Bryan Matthews said in a statement the investigation remains underway, and that the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office is conducting a probe.
“Hayward Police Department investigators and investigators from other involved agencies are still in the fact-finding phases of this investigation. There is much we do not know and many questions that still must be answered,” Matthews said.
A spokesperson for Falck said “privacy laws” prevent the ambulance company from “discussing any care we provide a patient,” but added that “Falck stands behind the care provided by our dedicated paramedics and EMTs across Alameda County.”
The details around Hoang’s death echo similar incidents involving military veterans. Last year, the city of Antioch paid $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit by the family of a Navy veteran, Angelo Quinto, who died in a struggled with police officers who restrained him and sat on his legs. In 2020, the city of Alameda paid $250,000 in a similar settlement to the family of Shelby Gattenby, an Iraq War veteran who served in the Navy, and died in a struggle — which included use of a stun gun — with four Alameda officers.
Like Quinto, Hoang had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Fernandez said Hoang sought out drugs — police say he appeared high on methamphetamine, which was found in his car — to deal with PTSD, but it made things worse. He would cycle through year-long periods of sobriety, then relapse.
Often, during times of psychosis, he would imagine threats to his family, she said.
“His mind would go back to being back in Iraq. And for some reason he’d be looking for his children every time,” Fernandez said. That’s what she believes he was doing on March 12, during the 4 a.m. struggle with police and paramedics.
“He thought his children were in danger that night. He went back to war that night,” she said. “His thoughts were, ‘Where’s my family, are they safe.’”