Driver with brain haemorrhage arrested by officers who thought she was drunk

Driving home from work on the day her life changed forever, Nicole McClure felt her feet tingling and her sense of direction wavering. Then she saw colorful lights illuminating the early morning landscape.

“Oh, nice lights,” she remembers thinking, not realizing a highway patrol car was coming up behind her. During what should have been a simple drive home from her late-night job at Walmart near Olympia, Washington, Ms. McClure became increasingly disoriented and crashed into two roundabouts before stopping.

The state trooper who had followed her ran to her door with his gun drawn and yelled at her to get out of the car, according to his dashcam video. He demanded to know if she had been drinking or taking drugs. She denied it. “I'm not really feeling well,” she said. The soldier was not convinced. She was taken to jail, charged with driving under the influence.

The arrest marked the start of a more than 24-hour ordeal in the criminal justice system, at a time when Ms McClure was in urgent need of medical care. Her lawyers said she lay in her own urine on the floor of a cell as prison staff taunted her and apparently dismissed her as drunk. When someone finally realized she needed medical attention, records show, doctors discovered a brain hemorrhage and she was rushed into surgery. She spent 17 days in the hospital and was no longer able to work or care for herself.

Ms. McClure's case, detailed in a lawsuit, case files and interviews, provides a shocking insight into how the quick assumptions law enforcement officers sometimes make during traffic stops can have devastating consequences.

Many law enforcement agencies now offer drug recognition training to help officers distinguish between someone who is under the influence and someone who is in a medical crisis. Yet assessment failures continue to lead to delays in medical care, some of which are fatal. Boston and San Diego each had recent cases of drunken driving arrests that later turned out to be drivers who had suffered a stroke. A similar case emerged last year in Puyallup, Wash., not far from where Mrs. McClure lives.

“I knew I wasn't drunk, I just didn't feel well. I was so tired,” Ms. McClure said in an interview in her apartment, where she is now largely confined due to brain damage, that her claims in the lawsuit were made much worse by the delay in medical care.

A spokesman for the Washington State Patrol declined to comment, citing the lawsuit. Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders, who oversees the jail where Ms. McClure was being held, said in a statement that a thorough investigation into the “serious” allegations was underway.

“The safety of our inmates and staff remains our top priority,” he said.

Before her arrest, Ms. McClure, 38, enjoyed hiking and cooking. She keeps photos of herself from that time, now that she struggles with both activities.

She took a job as a night stock clerk at Walmart in 2022. One evening in March of the same year, she was still at work when she found herself in a state of confusion. She couldn't seem to operate the scanning machine she used for work. She had trouble setting an alarm on her phone. Her hands became sweaty and her feet stung.

Ultimately, Ms. McClure recalls, her boss let her leave work early.

In law enforcement documents, Officer Jonathan Barnes wrote that he saw Ms. McClure's car traveling at a slow speed and leaving the lane not far from the Walmart. He turned on his lights and sirens, but then turned them off when the car didn't stop. He later saw the vehicle drive over an elevated section of a roundabout and then hit the center of a second roundabout, damaging a front tire.

After Ms. McClure came to a stop, video shows Mr. Barnes yelling at her to get out of her vehicle. He accused Ms. McClure of eluding police and resisting arrest, and placed handcuffs on Ms. McClure's wrists. One of her hands was still holding her keys, and the officer accused her of trying to use them as a weapon, although there was no sign of that on the video.

In a flat voice, Mrs. McClure repeatedly insisted that she had not escaped. “I think I'm really tired,” she told the officer. She said she left work because she “felt dizzy” and denied using substances. “Please let me go,” she said.

But Mr Barnes ignored her protests. “All you're telling me is that you're under the influence,” he told her.

According to records, another trooper who arrived on the scene at a sobriety test asked Ms. McClure to estimate when 30 seconds had passed. She estimated it at 35 seconds. The troopers reported that she had “very strong and distinct eyelid twitches.” She told them she had smoked marijuana two days earlier. She was then taken to hospital – not for treatment, but to take blood samples to test for intoxicants.

Before these results could be analyzed, Mrs. McClure was taken to the county jail. There, Ms. McClure recalled, one of the guards teased her by saying, “Why don't you take another shot?” She said she replied that she wasn't drunk, but she wasn't feeling well.

“I remember them telling me to put on their clothes,” Ms. McClure said. “I tried to put on my pants, but I couldn't. I kept putting the same leg in the same trouser leg.”

From there, she was placed in a cell, where at one point she was found in a pool of her own urine, her lawyers said. She started vomiting.

She remained that way for more than 24 hours until the jail's medical team was called in to examine her and recommended she be taken to the hospital, records show. The toxicology analysis ultimately found no signs of alcohol or drugs.

Instead, doctors at the hospital diagnosed a brain hemorrhage that likely started with a blood clot in the brain, and removed part of her skull to relieve the pressure, according to Ms. McClure's lawsuit. The damage to her brain resulted in “a lifetime of diminished capacity,” the lawsuit claims.

In an interview, Ms. McClure struggled to formulate the words to describe her situation. She said the episode left her struggling to care for herself. She cannot drive or work. Sometimes she can't remember all her medical appointments, or even where she is.

“I'm afraid to go into a store without knowing where my ride is parked,” she said. “I'm afraid to go outside.”

In her lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial and damages, Ms. McClure's attorney, Anne Vankirk, argued that her long-term injuries were preventable and suffered as a result of delays in receiving treatment.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who now works as a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said it can sometimes be difficult for officers to determine whether someone's behavior is the result of mental illness, substances or a medical episode. The latest training recommendations, he said, call for officers to always be on the lookout for indicators of medical problems and to make the mistake of seeking professional help if there is a potential health problem.

“Officers are not doctors, not paramedics,” he said. “They really don't have, and won't have, the expertise to diagnose the cause of the medical problems. But they must be able to identify indicators.”