Cops Battered A Man Suffering A Seizure, Cooked Up Criminal Charges To Cover Up Their Actions

It often seems that anything not immediately comprehensible to a law enforcement officer must be responded to with violence. Sure, we get to hear plenty about officers’ “training and expertise,” but the tool set seems extremely limited when it comes to dealing with unforeseen circumstances.

Whatever can’t be handled with a gun can probably be handled with a Taser and a bit of a beating. Already a problematic workflow, but it gets even worse when cops are asked to be first responders for calls better handled by EMTs or mental health care specialists.

Because we ask cops to do jobs they’re not trained to do, we end up with the sort of thing far too often. But these cops are far from blameless. They didn’t have to respond the way they did to a medical emergency. And they sure as shit didn’t need to follow up their initial mistake with something far, far more nefarious.

It starts out badly enough. It gets a lot more horrible from there.

In the early hours of Aug. 29, 2022, San Anselmo resident Alice Frankel awoke to strange noises coming from the man who was then her fiance and is now her husband. When she turned on a light, she said, Bruce Frankel’s arms were stiffly extended, his legs were shaking, his eyes were rolled back and his mouth foamed. 

She called 911, worried he was dying. A neurologist would later diagnose Bruce Frankel with epilepsy and say he had suffered a grand mal seizure. 

People think calling 911 will get them the best help the fastest. That’s not always the case. Sometimes, you just get the first people who show up, and who aren’t the best fit for the situation.

That was the case here. The first person on the scene was Officer Kevin Sinnott of the Central Marin Police Authority (CMPA). Dispatchers had told Officer Sinnott that 62-year-old Bruce Frankel was in “an altered state.” Frankel, who had already stumbled in the bathroom and cut his back open, continued to struggle through his seizure. Officer Sinnott tried to restrain Frankel. Frankel “resisted,” so to speak. He did not comply because it was impossible for him to comply.

All of this was captured on the officer’s body camera.

The struggle went on for several minutes before the officer shocked Bruce Frankel twice with a Taser, the video shows. After more officers and EMTs arrived, and Bruce Frankel was finally handcuffed and taken away in an ambulance, he was bloodied and had injuries to both arms and a cut across his nose, his lawsuit states.

Now, at this point, everything is just extremely unfortunate. An officer who didn’t recognize what he was dealing with and was untrained to handle someone suffering through a tonic-clonic seizure responded like any cop would: he deployed force until he had control of the situation. In this case, securing control likely occurred as soon as the seizure ended.

And it would have just remained an unfortunate occurrence, albeit one that might indicate calls requiring medical attention be handled by actual medical professionals, rather than some guy with a Taser and the ability to yell “stop resisting” over and over again until the words lose their meaning.

It’s what happened after this that shocks the conscience, which has not only the expected definition but a legal definition when it comes to civil rights lawsuits.

At 3:26 a.m., Sinnott spoke to a fellow officer, Sean Fahy, about whether a crime occurred. After Fahy said, “There’s nothing criminal here,” Sinnott said, “I don’t think he’s competent to commit a crime.”

But two minutes later, Sinnott spoke to officer Joel Heaps, a CMPA corporal who later identified himself as a supervising officer on the case. Heaps asked if Bruce Frankel committed “243(b),” a battery on a police officer. Sinnott said no. Seconds later, Heaps asked, “Was there any 240?” referring to an attempted assault, and Sinnott said yes.

Three minutes later, Heaps said, “I understand this is a medical, but at the point that he starts fighting our uniformed officers, there’s a 240 or 243(b).” Sinnott then said, “I felt like I got battered.”

This could have been handled with an apology and an honest effort to make sure Frankel received the proper medical attention. Instead, an officer who screwed up his response decided to turn Frankel into a criminal with the assistance of his supervisor. Officer Sinnott capped it all off by filing a report stating that he had detained Frankel for being the perpetrator of a “possible domestic battery” and was “under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”

None of this was true but it was enough to get Frankel handcuffed to a hospital bed after Officer Sinnott repeated his lies to hospital staff, claiming there had been a “pretty big scuffle” and that Frankel was under arrest for a bunch of imagined crimes.

Five hours later — and after Officer Heaps insinuated Frankel had attacked Officer Sinnott — Frankel was discharged from the hospital and taken to jail. They processed Frankel for the (made up) charges and cut him loose. Basically, the cops just abandoned Frankel, who was still wearing his hospital garb.

In his paper hospital clothing, Bruce Frankel walked several blocks — with no money or cellphone — to Northgate Gas, where an attendant helped him call a taxi home, he said. In the taxi home, he said, “All I could think about was how and what I was going to tell my friends and colleagues.” 

At this point, Frankel still believed he had assaulted an officer while suffering through his seizure. It wasn’t until the Marin County DA’s office called Frankel’s wife to offer its support for her as a “victim of domestic violence” that the Frankels became aware of the extent of the charges manufactured against Bruce. Once the DA’s office had a chance to view the recordings of the arrest, it withdrew the charges with prejudice. It helps but it’s too late. Now, the county has a lawsuit [PDF] to deal with.

Let’s hope justice is swift. Even if a court can find some way to condone the use of force against a person in the throes of a tonic-clonic seizure, there’s no way a court can condone the manufacturing of criminal charges in an attempt to cover up an officer’s actions. And if cops in Marin County are doing this sort of thing while being recorded by their own cameras, there’s every reason to believe this isn’t the first time they’ve done this, nor is it the sort of thing they’re uncomfortable doing.