Video prompts mom to sue Bristol over son’s 2017 death

GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) — A woman whose son died seven years ago after a 911 call to his home has sued the City of Bristol, Tenn. and numerous police officers and paramedics for their alleged role in his death — a role Karen Goodwin didn’t learn about until a year ago, when a video surfaced during an Associated Press investigation.

“It was totally different from everything I had thought for six years,” Goodwin told WATE’s sister station, WJHL, of events surrounding the Aug. 30, 2017 death of her son, 23-year-old Austin “Hunter” Turner. “They told me he died of an overdose. He didn’t.”

Goodwin’s federal lawsuit, filed Aug. 14, alleges that when officials responded to a 911 call from Turner’s girlfriend late on Aug. 29, 2017, “(i)nstead of providing medical care, Defendants subjected Austin Turner to inhumane acts of violence, ultimately resulting in his death on Aug. 30, 2017.”

Body cam video shows Turner, who was not suspected of any type of crime, being shocked with a stun device, forcibly handcuffed, shackled and covered to his neck with a mesh “spit sock” before being loaded onto a gurney and taken to an ambulance. He stopped breathing about four minutes later.

The suit essentially accuses the responders of “use of excessive and unreasonable force with deliberate indifference to Turner’s federally protected rights as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.” It further asserts those alleged actions “were made willfully, wantonly, and recklessly in disregard of Turner’s constitutional rights.” It requests a trial and seeks damages “in a sum to be determined by the jury.”

Counts include Excessive Use of Force and Failure to Protect, against the police officers; Deliberate Indifference to Safety and Health, against the paramedics; Intentional Delay of Access to Medical Care, against the police officers; and Public Entity Liability, against the City of Bristol.

The suit contends that responders should have taken a vastly different approach to helping Turner because he was either having a seizure or in a “postictal state” that occurs just after one. The suit claims an eight-minute 911 call from his girlfriend, Michelle Stowers, to an operator is filled with description of Turner’s seizure activity — and with instructions from the operator not to try and restrict Turner’s seizure or to lay him on his stomach.

“The Paramedic Defendants knew that restraining a seizure patient by handcuffing his hands behind his back, face-down on a gurney creates a substantial risk of injury and death.”

Bristol City Attorney Danielle Smith responded to an email request for comment, writing the city’s policy “is not to comment on pending litigation.”

‘Information … that tore my world apart’

Turner died barely an hour after paramedics arrived at his Bristol apartment following Stowers’ call. Goodwin said Stowers had called her first, and she’d told her to call 911. She arrived at their apartment shortly after the paramedics.

“I honestly thought that night that they were there to help,” Goodwin said. “I was so relieved to see them come to the door. This is my baby.”

Goodwin’s positive opinion of first responders was backed up by a death certificate that listed the cause of death as multiple drug toxicity, though the drugs listed — buprenorphine (suboxone) and THC (marijuana) — are seldom associated with fatalities.

“For many years, I was mad at my son, because you got to blame somebody when there’s a death,” Goodwin said. “Then they bring this information to me that tore my world apart.”

The lawsuit, filed by DRS Law of Nashville, relies heavily on body camera video obtained by AP reporters Mitch Weiss and Kristin Hall in the course of a multi-year investigation into deaths involving “less-lethal force” by law enforcement.

The reporters showed up at Goodwin’s home on Aug. 14, 2023 and told her they wanted to write a story on what had happened to her son. Six days later, they returned to Goodwin’s home and showed her the video.

“There are no words, no words for what I saw,” she said of viewing the video on Aug. 20, 2023. “And when I was done with the video, all I could do was stand up and walk away.”

‘You’re going to get tased if you keep it up’

The nearly 30-minute video ends abruptly 10 minutes after paramedics notice Turner isn’t breathing, just after one is heard saying, “Y’all ain’t recording, are you?” By that time, it had recorded about 10 minutes inside Turner’s apartment and another 18 or so minutes in the ambulance.

During the first segment, as Turner is restrained with various devices, responders alternately shout orders at him and express concern.

Within seconds of arriving, a police officer says, “You’re going to get tased if you keep it up!” Shortly after the shock is administered another voice says, “Stop it now! Put your hands behind your back now!”

Responders can be heard talking about Versed, a drug that can calm people, with one responder saying — seconds after they discuss someone “getting leg shackles” — “Why you fightin’,” one says. “We’re gonna give you some medicine that’ll calm you down if you let it.”

In the video, at least some responders seem convinced that Turner has not only overdosed but done so using some type of stimulant as opposed to an opioid.

“Narcan or Versed?” someone asks. “He’s dilated,” another voice responds. “Narcan ain’t gonna touch it.”

Several minutes later, just after Turner has been put in the ambulance, a voice asks, “Did anyone talk to the girlfriend, see what the hell he took?”

Earlier, a paramedic had said, “If I back off are you going to calm down? Because you’re not going to win this battle. Do you understand … Listen, Hunter, I’m a paramedic, I’m trying to help you. But you’re gonna have to work with us. Your family’s here and they’re worried about you, ok?”

‘Is he breathing?’

Six minutes after a voice says, “Can we get the cot in here and put him belly down,” Turner is loaded into the ambulance. The officer’s body cam shows at least 10 first responders outside.

For the next few minutes, the handful of people inside the ambulance talk about the encounter that had just concluded inside as Turner lies prone on his stomach.

Shackles bind his ankles. Seat belt-like straps are wrapped around his legs just above the knees and around his arms and torso at the level of his biceps. His handcuffed hands are at his sides. One police officer’s gloved hand is on Turner’s upper back, while another alternately has one or both hands on Turner’s mesh-covered head.

“Hunter, calm down buddy,” a voice says a couple of minutes following his placement in the ambulance and after he twitches under the restraints.

“Y’all guys ready to go?” a voice says shortly after. “Just keep the airway open on him, make sure he’s breathin’, we’re goin.'”

As a paramedic discusses their early efforts to keep Turner in a chair inside the apartment, he says Turner got out of the chair and that “we been through that situation before, we just (thought it) best to take him down as he was because we knew he was going to overpower us. They kept saying ‘let him up’ and I was like, ‘I ain’t having that.'”

“I don’t know what he’s taken but he’s fully dilated — usually that’s not opiate-based, that’s… some kind of.”

The paramedic pauses for a second at this point then says, “Is he breathing?”

The police officer who’s been holding Turner’s head puts his fingers to his neck, then the paramedic reaches over to do the same.

“We’ve gotta switch him over,” he says.

As the men work to turn him over, a voice shouts, “Hunter! Hunter!”

Fifty seconds after noticing Turner isn’t breathing, a responder gets his handcuffs unlocked. Thirteen seconds after that, the mesh spit sock is pulled off, revealing Turner’s pale face, his eyes closed. Chest compressions begin just a few seconds later.

About seven minutes later, as the group continues working on Turner, a paramedic asks, ‘Do y’all have your body cam on all the time?'”

“‘Yeah, it’s on the entire time,'” the officer responds.

About three minutes later, the responders begin preparing to take Turner out of the ambulance and into the hospital.

“What the hell happened here?” a new voice asks. “Did we cut his damn airway off?”

“No,” someone responds

“Y’all ain’t recording are you?” the new voice asks. Two seconds later, the audio ends, with the recording ending five seconds after that.

‘I really need them to know how to deal with the next one’

While the lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, Goodwin said she is just as interested in having more first responders familiarized with the best way to deal with someone who’s having any type of seizure. She said her son’s seizure was a type that causes the body to get very stiff.

“They need to know how to handle that,” she said. “They need to know the difference in these seizures if they’re going to go on these calls.”

“I never, ever, ever want another mother or father or brother to have to go through what we’ve been through. I really need them to know how to deal with the next one.”

That said, Goodwin has dealt with some anger over what she learned all those years later.

Knowing the 911 dispatcher told Stowers to keep Turner off his stomach and not restrain him, and having seen the video, she questions that earlier conclusion enough to go to federal court over it.

The lawsuit claims responders either ignored basic protocols for dealing with someone having a seizure or were ignorant of those protocols but shouldn’t have been. In the case of the paramedics, it says they “consciously disregarded the injurious interaction between improper restraint and an individual suffering from a seizure.”

It adds several other allegations of “conscious disregard” for proper action by the paramedics, saying they instead assisted police officers or failed to prevent them from dangerous acts. It also alleges they “failed to provide Turner any medical treatment whatsoever until he went into cardiopulmonary arrest as a result of their actions.”

Goodwin said none of those things matched with her vantage point the night of her son’s death. She recounted seeing responders around her son during the times she was on the edge of the room.

“They were going to take care of this. I didn’t have to worry about it because they were taking care.”

“What I saw in the video … changed my whole opinion. I mean, I was brought up not to question authority.”

‘This opened it up like it was brand new’

Pictures of Hunter are all over Goodwin’s house. She’s extremely thankful to Weiss and Hall, the AP reporters, for bringing the information to her attention.

She said she “goes back and forth” on whether she’d just as soon not have known.

“This opened it up like it was brand new, and this time it wasn’t my son’s funeral,” she said.

Goodwin said she hasn’t ever tried to pretend her son was perfect. He smoked pot and had also gotten a prescription for suboxone. Stowers told the dispatcher the night of his death that she didn’t know whether Turner had used that day.

But Goodwin said there wasn’t a lethal amount of either drug in his system — and that Hunter Turner was a good guy who was well-liked, as evidenced by a huge number of people who turned out for his receiving of friends.

“We were there at 4 and it went until well after closing, just people coming through,” she said. “I even had a phone call asking me just to hang on for a few minutes, an older woman was trying to get there. Ms. Annette. Boys and Girls Club. She had had him when he was small, and she remembered him well.”

Turner played football, rode motorcycles and was caring, Goodwin said.

“Even in the worst situations he could make you laugh,” she said.

She remembers Turner coming to see her every day, but not going directly to her house.

“He would stop up the road and we have three elderly neighbors right here in a row. He would start at one and go visit each one of them before he would come see me even. He was just that kind of guy.”

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