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4-23-05

 

The last few hours of Keith Raymond Drum's life were spent as much of the rest of his life was, in an altered state of consciousness due to the use of drugs, in this case, meth amphetamine. Described by a friend as a "functional tweaker", Drum had a long history of meth use as well as ongoing problems with alcohol, which had caused significant damage to his liver in the form of cirrhosis. Identified as a transient in police reports, Drum had been working for several years as a waiter at Cabos Mexican restaurant in Clearlake and had been living in a variety of places in town, including the homeless encampment in the field behind the Safeway store on Olympic Drive. While Drum's previous encounters with the Clearlake police had been relatively frequent, they had not been of a serious or violent nature, until the incident that occurred in the early morning hours of November 7th 2004.

 

All the eyewitness accounts of Drum's behavior that day were the same, he was obviously in a very delusional and irrational state, claiming that "lasers" were coming out of his eyes and mouth. After a bizarre series of exchanges with friends and local business persons, Drum wound up at the home of a friend a few blocks from the Clearlake police station at around 4:30 in the morning, where he insisted that he needed to call 9-1-1. After Drum placed a confusing call to 9-1-1 dispatch mistakenly claiming that his girlfriend had been abducted, two Clearlake police officers were sent to the Redwood Drive residence he had called from. Officers Michael Ray and Dominic Ramirez headed up Olympic Drive already knowing that an arrest was almost certain, since 9-1-1 always runs warrant checks on callers, and Drum had an outstanding civil warrant for family code violations. It's likely that the warrant was issued for failure to pay child support to his only offspring, a daughter living in Nevada. While the officers were still en route, Drum placed two more calls to 9-1-1, both of which were as equally incoherent and rambling as the first.

 

When the officers arrived at the home, officer Ramirez went to the back of the residence, while officer Ray approached the front door. At this point Drum was dashing back and forth from window to window, claiming that the men outside were not "the real police", and begged his friend not to let them in. Officer Ray contacted Drum and his friend on the front porch, and at one point placed his hand on Drum's shoulder, which caused Drum to shout "get your hands off me" before the 41 year old 6‚1" 198 pound suspect launched a punch at the slightly smaller and much younger officer Ray. A fight rapidly developed as the combatants tumbled into the dwelling, and was quickly joined by officer Ramirez in an effort to get Drum under control. After several unheeded warnings to stop resisting, officer Ramirez pulled the firing darts out of his M-26 Taser and applied it to Drum's back as officer Ray struggled to pin Drum to the floor. The effect of the direct contact of the Taser was minimal, as were two more 50,000 volt shocks from the weapon. In fact, after the jolts from the Taser Drum was even more combative and he managed to wrestle the Taser from officer Ramirez grasp, but not realizing the weapon could only work in the direct contact mode at that time his indirect discharging of the Taser had no effect on the officers. After more struggling the two officers regained control of the Taser, and following Drum disobeying commands to stop resisting, officer Ray sprayed him in the face with a shot of pepper spray. The spray was as ineffective as the Taser, and the officers were forced to wrestle Drum into a position where he was laying on his stomach, at which point officer Ray claims he hit Drum just once between the shoulder blades with his can of pepper spray. Ray also claims he used his knee to push Drum to the floor, and soon he was somewhat restrained with both hands cuffed behind his back, although he was still trying to land backwards kicks on officer Ray. Now deputy Sheriffs Kiuya Brown and John Rynhart joined the fray, and helped to restrain Drum further by strapping his legs together with a hobbling device. The entire violent episode took place in approximately nine minutes, and an ambulance was summoned to check on Drum as soon as he was fully subdued, as is standard procedure any time a Clearlake police officer discharges their Taser and/or pepper spray on a suspect.

 

Officer Ray inquired as to Drum's condition and got no response from him, so deputy Brown checked to see if he was still breathing, and claims to have felt Drum's breath on his hand. That claim is somewhat doubtful, as by now Drum's lungs were hemorrhaging, and his right lung was filled with foaming blood. A few minutes later the officers realized that Drum had indeed stopped breathing and his heart had stopped as well, and they un-hand cuffed him and rolled him on his side in order to "clear his airway". At the same time deputy Brown placed another call to dispatch requesting that the ambulance proceed at "code three" pace, since Drum's face had already begun to turn blue, another clear indication of the dire nature of his condition . Strangely enough, even though Drum's heart and lung functions had obviously ceased, no attempt to perform CPR was made by the four officers until the ambulance crew arrived minutes later. After arriving at Redbud Hospital at 5:28 a.m., CPR was continued on Drum to no effect, and he was pronounced dead at 5:35 a.m.

 

The sum total of injuries inflicted on the four officers in the course of the fight consisted of a slight bruise to officer Ray's cheek, as well as what may have been a bite mark on his hand, neither of which was serious enough to require medical attention. Drum however, obviously did not fare as well as the police, as his injuries were numerous and quite severe considering that the only blow to his body admitted to by the officers was the single one on his back delivered by officer Ray with the pepper spray bottle. But the autopsy tells a different story, as a total of fourteen separate wounds are described on Drum's back alone (some of which were likely boot-prints), with another half dozen on his chest and abdomen. This doesn't even include multiple internal injuries or the numerous burns left from the repeated Taser shocks, or the many cuts and bruises on his arms, legs and face. The official finding of the autopsy was that Drum died of cardiorespiratory arrest associated with blunt force injuries, with secondary causes listed as meth amphetamine intoxication and the stress induced by the fight. The Lake County coroner has ruled Drum's death a homicide in his official report, as even though he had a high level of met amphetamine in his system, it wasn't a lethal dose and the damage to his lungs was certainly fatal by itself.

 

The autopsy further reveals that Drum had a severely broken rib, contusions and a large hemorrhage on his lungs, and more hemorrhages in the top right and both frontal lobes of his brain. In other words, plenty of damage from just one blow with a small pepper spray can between the shoulder blades. Not surprisingly, DA Gary Luck's required yet brief report on the incident concluded that the officers had done nothing wrong that rose to the level of criminality, and the Record-Bee's headline read "Police Cleared In Drum Death" when the autopsy report was finally made public four months after the incident took place. In another somewhat predictable move, the DA decided to tweak the coroner's findings and reality in his report, claiming that none of Drum's injuries alone would have caused his death, and that it was the combination of them that caused his demise. This flies in the face of the autopsy findings and common sense as well, as "cardiorespiritory arrest due to blunt force trauma" by itself would have certainly been fatal. But other questions are raised by Drum's death as well, like why the officers failed to attempt CPR on him as soon as he was found to have stopped breathing and had no pulse, and if the Taser should have been used on someone who the officers had reason to believe was under the influence of meth amphetamine. Tasers have been known to cause death when used on suspects under the influence of certain drugs (meth amphetamine in particular), particularly when multiple shocks are administered. The sometimes fatal danger of using Tasers on drug-using suspects is not mentioned in the Clearlake PD's Taser use policy documents, a critical omission in view of the numerous incidents Clearlake officers have involving meth amphetamine users like Drum. In fact, Clearlake PD's guidelines don't even restrict Taser use in any way on pregnant women, children or the elderly.

 

Actually, Drum had another reason a Taser shouldn't have been used on him that the officers couldn't have known about, and that was he had high blood pressure and moderately severe hardening of the arteries-two more risk factors that have proved fatal in Tasered suspects. So other than the glaring inconsistencies between the autopsy's conclusions and the officers report of blows dealt to Drum, The DA's re-writing the coroner's findings and failure of the officers to render appropriate medical care in a timely fashion, it was all by-the-book. Not that the book is much help, as the amazingly loose guidelines of the Clearlake PD's Taser use policy didn't cover much ground, and their documents repeatedly feature the proven false claim that Tasers are a non-lethal weapon. Also questionable is why the results of an autopsy done two days after the death of Drum took four months to release, why the statement from one of the two civilian eye witnesses last line was that the suspect was not Tasered while handcuffed, which would have been a violation of Clearlake PD's guidelines if the suspect was not resisting and not posing a threat to others. The statements from both witnesses (which essentially back the police version of events), are somewhat dubious, as one was from a very elderly woman who likely did not see the entire incident and had a questionable memory, and the other came from a middle-aged man who had a weak recollection of the event and was clearly concerned with repercussions from the police when questioned for this article. Drum had few family members (none of whom are local), and no lawsuits are pending at this time regarding his in-custody death.

 

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