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This episode includes descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Please use discretion.
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On December 23rd, 2020, Bella Kimoto Collins was home from college to celebrate the holidays with her family
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in California. >> We had gone to my mom's work. They just had a small get-together, you know, masks on. Um and
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I grew up at my mom's work, really. So, they're kind of [music] like family. Um so, we kind of spent the afternoon with
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them, I guess, [music] and then came home. And we're just relaxing. >> [music] >> A few months earlier, Bella's mother and
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Bella's two adult brothers had moved into a new house in a town called Antioch, [music] near San Francisco.
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When Bella and her mother, Cassandra, [music] had come back from seeing Cassandra's
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colleagues that day, Bella's oldest brother, [music] Angelo, was in his room sleeping.
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Cassandra says she went to his bedroom >> because there was a package for him. You
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know, a package that he's been waiting for for a while. So, I knocked on his door
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and kind of woke him up. And he's like, "Oh, thank you, Mom. Just leave it there."
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And then, [music] you know, he I went out and he just went back to sleep. >> When the pandemic hit, Angelo, who was
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12 years older than Bella, had lost his job and moved in with Cassandra. Before that, Angelo had joined the US
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Navy. >> [music] >> It was his dream career, but because of an allergy, he'd left during boot camp
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in 2019. Now, he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do next. He liked gaming and was thinking about
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becoming a game designer. After talking to Angelo, Cassandra went to the living room and at some point she
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fell asleep on the couch. Then, around 10:00 p.m., Angelo woke her up. >> And I said, "Yes, what do you want?" You
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know. He goes, um, "What's for dinner?" And I was kind of upset about that because he I mean, you
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know, he usually cooks for himself. He loves to cook. So, when he asked me what's for dinner is, I was
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like, "What What do you mean?" You know, I was kind of upset cuz he woke me up from my
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sleep, my nap. >> He clearly wasn't himself. Um, at a certain point I was on a Zoom with my
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friend and he just kept coming into the room and like asking, "Oh, what's going on?" He seemed really worried.
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It looked like the beginnings of an episode, as we'd called it. He'd had a couple of them throughout 2020.
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Um, in which he would just kind of act oddly, just not like himself, and really anxious and scared.
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Um, but it was really infrequent and then it almost seemed like he was normal the next day.
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>> The family says he had started having these episodes after a head injury. Did this night
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seem different than than other episodes that he had had? >> No, actually. Um, >> It's actually the way we dealt with it,
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right? >> Yeah. We We didn't have much tolerance for it at that point. Um, in previous episodes I
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I'd say there were about five total throughout that year. Um, he required patience when he was feeling
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that way, when he was afraid, when he was asking the same questions, um when he looked past you and thought he saw
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something, he required a patience that spanned 8 hours sometimes. >> A few months before, a neighbor had
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called the police because they'd seen Angelo trying to climb a fence. They said he was yelling.
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The police took him to the hospital. Cassandra says Angelo had been worried that maybe he had bipolar disorder or
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schizophrenia. She wanted him to see a psychiatrist so he could get help. She says that when he was having these
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episodes, he would ask her again and again if he was going to be okay. She'd often need to sit with him for a
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long time to calm him down. >> And we didn't have that patience that night. And I think that really escalated
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his anxiety. >> Over the next hour or so, Angelo seemed to get more and more scared and anxious.
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He wanted Cassandra and Bella to stay close to him. He locked arms with the two of them and
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started walking them around the kitchen. >> And that, of course, then heightened our
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anxieties and I know that I was thinking in the moment, "Oh my gosh, he's getting
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really, really afraid." >> Bella, who was 18 at the time, said she started to feel really worried.
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>> At a certain point, I had told him, "Please, you know, let let go. I'm going to call the police if you don't stop
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holding us." And he just I could tell he couldn't understand what I was saying. >> kept on saying, "What's going on? What's
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going on?" >> And that, you know, that freaked me out. >> Bella called 911 to ask for help.
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>> Because I just felt like I had no other option. My dad was in Berkeley at the time
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and I thought that's too far away. He wouldn't be able to get here fast enough. >> Bella told the 911 operator that her
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brother was, quote, being aggressive and hurting her mother. She said that Angelo had tried to pick
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up a hammer so she had picked it up instead and had it with her. The operator asked her,
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"Do you know if he takes any drugs?" And Bella replied, "Yes." At one point in the call, someone
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yelled, "Stop it. Stop it." At the end of the call, Bella said to the operator, "Sorry. Thank you."
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What were you hoping the police would do to help once they showed up? >> Um calm him down in a way that we
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couldn't. >> Shortly after 11:00 p.m., two police officers arrived at their house.
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The police dispatcher had told them about Bella's call, that she said her brother was hurting
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their mother. The police said that when they arrived, Angelo was being, quote, actively
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restrained by Cassandra on the floor in a bear hug. Cassandra and Bella say that Angelo was
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calm. >> He wasn't trying to get away from me because I think that's what he wanted
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is, um, for me to be there. He was just breathing heavily, but he was calm. He was very calm and that's what, uh,
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the police officer saw when they came in the house. >> The police officer started to handcuff
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Angelo. They rolled him onto his stomach. According to the police, he started to
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struggle and they bent one leg over the other to restrain him. Cassandra and Bella say Angelo didn't
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struggle. At some point, another two police officers showed up. Cassandra and Bella say that first one
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officer and then another had their knee on Angelo's neck. They say it went on for over 4 minutes.
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The police later said that an officer quote briefly for a few seconds had a knee across a portion of Angelo's
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shoulder blade. We reached out to the Antioch Police Department for comment. We didn't hear
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back. >> What was he saying? Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me. >> The officers called an ambulance and
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asked for help with a mental health crisis. They asked for a code two, meaning as
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quick as you can but not an emergency. Two of the police officers later said they'd responded to Angelo's previous
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incident when he was trying to climb a fence. And one of them said that he thought
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Angelo had behaved in a similar way. He wasn't making sense. Cassandra decided to get her phone out
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to start recording what was going on. >> Cuz I wanted Angelo to go to therapy and
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to go to a psychiatrist so that he could be properly medicated. >> [sighs and gasps]
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>> Whenever um I talked to him about his episodes, you know, he could not believe that
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he did that. So, this particular time, I made sure to record it, you know. So, the next day I would have him listen
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to it and he's going to go, "Okay, Mom." >> One of the police officers told Cassandra that Angelo wasn't under
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arrest and that he would be transferred to a hospital for evaluation because it seemed like he might be a danger to
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himself or others. Cassandra said that Angelo hadn't been attacking them, but that he had been hallucinating and
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paranoid and didn't want to be alone. One of the police officer said, "That's why he's going to the hospital,
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not to jail." Angelo had gone quiet. >> I asked them twice actually if he was asleep
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>> [snorts] >> cuz I want them to, you know, check on how he's doing. >> Angelo was still lying on the floor with
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his hands handcuffed behind his back and it became clear that he was unconscious.
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One of the police officer said, "What's going on with him?" >> It actually became very quiet as soon as
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um they saw as soon as they flipped him and they saw blood coming out from his mouth
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and you know, rolled up his eye, showed up his head. It became very quiet. >> When Cassandra's video starts, two
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police officers are standing over Angelo trying to communicate with him. They're wearing face masks and blue
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rubber gloves. The officers move Angelo onto his side and one of them rubs his chest. There's
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blood on Angelo's face. >> What what what happened? >> Angelo. Angelo. Does he have any medications?
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>> I Not that I know of. Come on. Come on, can you take him, please? Please, please.
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>> The officers unlock the handcuffs and move Angelo onto a stretcher. Cassandra follows them.
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There's blood on the bedroom floor where Angelo had been lying face down. >> [music]
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>> They start doing CPR on Angelo. Then they push the stretcher out of the house and into an ambulance.
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>> [music] >> I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. >> [music] >> When Angelo was rolled out of the house
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on a stretcher, Bella says she thought he looked purple. Angelo was rushed to the hospital.
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>> [music] >> Cassandra and Bella had to stay back to answer questions from the police.
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>> They said they were going to take us to the police station and I said, "Why?"
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Um to be interviewed, they said. And I go, "Well, you know, they already >> [music]
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>> did ask questions just a little while ago." And they said, "Don't worry, we're
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just It's just [music] going to be, you know, like It's the same questions." >> At the police station, Cassandra and
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Bella were questioned separately about what had happened that night. Cassandra says a detective asked her if
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she had hit Angelo earlier since he had a bloody nose. She answered, "No." While they were at the police station,
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Cassandra says she got a call from a doctor who was treating Angelo at the hospital.
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When she answered it, she says a police officer rushed over and told her to get off the phone.
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They said she'd get a chance to talk to the doctors later. As Bella and Cassandra had been on their
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way to the police station, Angelo's stepfather, Robert, arrived at the house. >> When I arrived, they were questioning
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me. Did he have something? Did he eat something he shouldn't have? Has he taken drugs? Is he allergic to
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something? >> He was told he couldn't enter the house. Their whole street was closed off.
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More police officers kept arriving, moving in and out of the house, which was marked off with crime scene tape.
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Police officers were standing guard around it. For hours, Robert stayed in the driveway
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with his dog, who had been in the car with him, and Angelo's younger brother, who'd come
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back after spending time at a friend's house. Around 6:30 that morning, Bella and
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Cassandra got back from the police station. Their house was still full of police and
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investigators. >> Cassandra got a call from the doctor. And uh she asked me to take it, and I
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spoke with the doctor. And he indicated to me that, you know, Angelo's >> [gasps]
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>> brain was, you know, 98% dead. There's only a tiny portion of the brain stem left alive.
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>> The family went to the hospital to see Angelo, but because of COVID protocols,
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they were told they couldn't come inside. When they got back home at around 8:30
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in the morning, the police had left. When the family walked through the house, there was still a smear of blood
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on the floor where Angelo had been lying on his stomach, and Angelo's bedroom seemed to have been
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searched. >> It's just like everything is upside down. It's been, you know, every last little thing has been
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tossed and turned, and it's on the floor, and it's just just a mess. >> The police had taken things from
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Angelo's bedroom, including his cell phone and some photographs. In the kitchen,
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the family says they found a felony search warrant. The warrant said the police were
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authorized to take anything that, quote, tends to show that a felony has been committed or that a particular person
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has committed a felony. Robert says they were shocked. The police had told them that Angelo wasn't
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under arrest and hadn't committed a crime. That morning on December 24th, the family kept calling the hospital,
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but they couldn't get permission to visit Angelo. >> On the 25th, they called us
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and said we could, you know, come and visit him. So, um Robert and I went. >> Angelo was unresponsive. He was on a
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breathing machine and his eyes were taped closed. He only had a faint heartbeat.
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>> I was um reading him this Christmas card that everybody wrote on and um as soon as I was done, the nurse
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said, "I'm sorry, I don't think he heard you." Or she said something and I go, "Oh, isn't
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it that when you're in a coma, um you can still hear, you know, you can still hear what other people are saying? So,
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you you kind of like constantly talk to them." And then she said, "Well, um yeah, but
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in Angelo's case, I don't think that is possible." >> The family says they felt like they
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couldn't get clear information from the hospital staff. Later, medical records cited in court
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documents said that when Angelo first arrived at the hospital, staff had been instructed
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by the police not to talk to them about Angelo's condition. A doctor had added it as a note to
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Angelo's medical record. >> I asked for um Angelo's toxicology report. And the nurse smiled at me and said,
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"I'm sorry, but we cannot provide that." And I'm like, "What do you mean? What do
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you mean you can't provide it? >> Casandra says she asked the nurse if it was because there was an investigation
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going on. And she remembers that the nurse nodded. >> So, I was getting, you know, like really
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upset. And then mad at that point. I'm the mother. I'm, you know, I need to know. I have to know.
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Um and she said, um let me go to my supervisor >> and ask. >> And so, what she did is that she said
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she can't give it to us. But she said, I'm going to look at it on screen. You might be able to see some of it over
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my shoulder. And so, she basically kind of showed it to us, but she didn't want to give us or
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give any proof that he she'd give it to us. But she let us see that there were no
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common substances of abuse found. >> On the morning of December 26th, they got a call from the hospital saying they
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should come visit Angelo as soon as possible. In the car on their way there, Casandra
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says they talked about getting a lawyer. Robert had already been making phone calls to friends and family to ask for
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recommendations. Casandra didn't think they needed one. >> You know, I I mean, I was on denial.
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But while I was, you know, with Angelo holding his hands, I was like, you know what? This is not
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right. And I looked at Robert and I said, you know what? Go ahead. Get a lawyer.
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>> Robert went out to the hospital parking lot and started making phone calls trying to explain to people what had
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happened in the past 3 days. Eventually, he spoke with a civil rights attorney who said he'd take the case.
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>> And then I came back and they said Angelo is now, >> [gasps and sighs] >> you know, he's he's he's going to pass.
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And the nurse said he's going to pass. And we waited about 20 minutes and then at 1:30 or 1:40 p.m. he did. He um
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his heart stopped. >> The next day, the family's new lawyers, John Burris and Ben Nisenbaum, came to
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their house in Antioch. >> I think we're still having a hard time realizing what's happened, but one of
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the first things that Ben said, he said basically they he thought they were going to blame it
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on excited delirium. If they have nothing else, they will say it was excited delirium.
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>> Had you ever heard that term before? What did you think? >> I actually the first thing the first
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question I asked what what is that? >> [music] >> What is excited delirium? >> For people who aren't that familiar with
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this term, what what does it mean? >> If I told you it meant nothing, then I think [music] that would be accurate.
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>> Attorney Ben Nisenbaum. >> In terms of what it purports to mean, it's essentially that
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the body disregulates itself [music] in a fatal manner. So so somehow the the heart stops beating because the body
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becomes so >> [music] >> unable to regulate itself. >> Had you ever handled other cases where
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it was used as a cause of death? >> Many. >> [music] >> Many. >> Many cases? >> I can think of at least a dozen.
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When people died during a police restraint, the immediate response >> [music] >> invariably was it wasn't the police, it
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was excited delirium. As if the person got so excited and became so delirious they
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they just spontaneously combusted. And I heard that I'd heard that so many times uh from the police over my career
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that I just knew that that's what [music] was to be expected. >> [music] >> We'll be right back.
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>> Excited delirium is this term that has a really contentious history, um a racist
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history. And it's used to describe a collection of symptoms. >> Reporter Renu Roy ism.
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>> But there's no diagnostic code for it. There's no blood test for it. There's no
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way to to test for it. I should note delirium is a clinical term. It is something that that people
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see in emergency rooms in hospitals. But the term excited delirium, it's it's kind of in some ways made up.
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>> It was first used in the 1980s. If you think about the 1980s in the US, there's a cocaine epidemic that was
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gripping much of the country. And there was a South Florida forensic pathologist
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named Charles Wetli. In 1985, Charles Wetli co-authored a paper on what he called cocaine-induced
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psychosis >> and excited delirium. He looked at the deaths of seven people, mostly men, who'd used cocaine.
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They'd all been restrained, usually by police, one of them by ER staff, >> [music]
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>> and suddenly died. He wrote that all seven had intense paranoia [music] followed by quote bizarre and violent
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behavior and sometimes quote unexpected [music] strength. >> And he said, "These are people who are
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scared, they are violent, they are panicked, then they are restrained, and then they died suddenly."
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And the problem with this theory is it was purely speculative, um and it didn't look at the role that restraints might
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have played in these deaths. They didn't really identify any scientific evidence
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or any toxicology reports or any way to uh back up or test their idea. >> Then, Charles Wetli started looking into
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a number of other cases. >> In the late '80s in in South Florida, Miami, several black women were dying.
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And they were dying in the same area in Miami, and in a really similar way. >> 12 women were found dead between 1986
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and 1988. Charles Wetli told reporters, "The typical scene is in a cheap room, a
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clump of bushes, or an abandoned building. They were discovered naked from the waist down, and they all had trace
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amounts of cocaine in their system." An article in the Miami News quoted Wetli as saying,
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"At first glance, it looks like she's been raped and murdered." But he said that wasn't the case.
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Wetli said the women likely died of cocaine psychosis. One newspaper article described it as,
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quote, "Sudden death from low levels of cocaine that caused the victims to go berserk
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and die within minutes." Some of the women were believed to have been sex workers.
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>> And he and his colleagues said that the combination of cocaine and sex is what
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led to these women's death. And he called it excited delirium. And, you know, he said that black women
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were more prone to dying this way, and that it was this combination of the stimulation from the cocaine and the sex
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that led to their death. He told reporters that when they examined the women's bodies, there were
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no signs of assault. Quote, the autopsies have conclusively showed that these women were not
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murdered. At one point, he worked on a theory that rain in Peru had somehow tainted a
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shipment of cocaine. The police closed the cases. Many of the women who were found dead
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were from Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Most of them were in their 20s and 30s.
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>> But then, in 1988, a 14-year-old girl named Antoinette Burns was found dead, and she was found dead in much the same
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way that the other women had died. Um Wetli did the initial autopsy, and he once again said that she too died of
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excited delirium. And the Burns family pushed back. I mean, this was a young girl, 14. They
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said she wasn't a sex worker, she didn't do drugs. Um she was last seen hitching
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a ride to the movies with a neighbor. And and the family really pushed back on this, but it wasn't until a toxicology
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report came back, um that Wetli's theory began to unravel. Antoinette Burns didn't have cocaine in
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her system. And after that, the chief medical examiner, so Wetli's boss, reviewed all the deaths of these women
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that Wetli had said died of excited delirium. And what he found was pretty startling.
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>> The chief medical examiner went back and looked at the photos from the autopsies
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of all the women who'd been found dead. He found lip and neck injuries and hemorrhaging in the eyes.
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He said that in many of these cases, the women had very, very clearly been strangled or asphyxiated to death. He
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said you could spot it a mile away. I mean, he said that these women, nearly 20 by
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this point, were actually homicide victims. Um and the police believed that a serial killer was responsible for
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their deaths. >> More women were found dead in 1989. >> [music] >> But then, in April of that year, the
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deaths finally seemed to stop. Months later, police [music] announced that they had a suspect in the cases.
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A 33-year-old man named Charles Henry Williams, who'd been arrested on rape charges in April, right when the string
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of murders ended. >> [music] >> But police said they didn't have enough evidence to charge him with the murders
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of the 32 women who they suspected him of killing over almost a decade. One of them was his neighbor,
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>> [music] >> and four had been found dead near his home. They ended up charging him with one
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murder of a 19-year-old woman named Patricia Johnson. 10 days before the start of the trial,
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Williams died of AIDS while in prison serving a sentence for rape. [music] But Charles Wetli stuck to his theory
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that excited delirium was real, and that at least some of the women in Miami had [music] died from it.
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>> You would think, you know, after the Antoinette Burns case, after this kind of
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huge thing in Miami where this guy said, "Oh, all these people died of excited delirium." And it turns out they had
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been murdered, >> [music] >> that the term would have completely fallen out of favor.
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But eventually it reemerged. >> [music] >> When the Kianto Collins family's attorney told them about excited
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delirium syndrome, Bella says that like her parents, she'd never heard of it before.
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>> I thought, "That sounds really stupid. Um, does not sound very sophisticated at
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all." But he described to us uh his experience with excited delirium in the past.
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>> So, after they told us about excited delirium, I said "I want a second autopsy."
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>> So, it was a, you know, I mean, I think the first thing is how do you pay for
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this autopsy? >> The family said the independent autopsy ended up costing them $18,000.
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When it came back, it said Angelo had died of asphyxiation. They were still waiting to hear the
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results of the county's official autopsy. On January 13th, 2021, they held a memorial service for Angelo
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in the garden of a local church. Months later, his family was notified that the county would hold a coroner's
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inquest. >> It's a hearing in which uh the county calls several witnesses. >> Attorney Ben Nissenbaum.
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>> Typically, the witnesses to the killing or death testify before jurors at the coroner's inquest.
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>> The jury at a coroner's inquest doesn't decide who is responsible for the death,
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only the quote cause and manner of death. >> What the jury finds goes into onto a death certificate.
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The jury determines whether the death was a homicide, a suicide, a natural death, or an accident.
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>> On the morning of August 20th, 2021, 8 months after Angelo had died, the Quintos-Collins family went to the
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local courthouse. The hearing was open to the public. Lots of people had showed up.
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>> [music] >> Friends and family, but also journalists. Bella says that the police officers who
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were going to be giving statements that day were already in the courtroom when the doors were opened to the public.
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>> And then, when we got the chance to come inside, my mom and I decided to sit right next
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to the officers. The court hearing wasn't led by a judge, but by a hearing officer, a lawyer named
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Matthew Guichard, who'd been contracted by the county. Guichard explained that in their county,
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Contra Costa County, the sheriff is also the coroner, meaning the sheriff determines the cause
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and manner of a person's death, and is part of arranging coroner's inquests. And when a person dies in police custody
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or during a police interaction, a coroner's inquest is required. California is one of just a few states
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where a county sheriff can also be the county's coroner. Matthew Guichard explained that this
00:31:35
wouldn't be like a trial you might see in the movies. Quote, "There won't be lawyers standing
00:31:41
up and asking questions." He said he would be the one asking the witnesses questions, and that he had
00:31:48
reviewed all of the documents, audio, and video recordings in the case. Attorney Ben Nissenbaum was in the
00:31:56
courtroom with the Quintos Collins family watching. >> We do get to submit questions, but the
00:32:02
hearing officer can decide not to ask those questions. So, the hearing officer has all the
00:32:10
power. You know, they can decide what what the jury gets to hear. >> Six witnesses were called. The county's
00:32:19
forensic pathologist, three of the police officers who were at the house in Antioch, a police detective, and a
00:32:26
detective from the DA's office. Bella and Cassandra were not on the list of witnesses.
00:32:33
>> Throughout that 4 hours of this inquest, They didn't mention my mother or myself
00:32:41
by name. We were the mother and the sister, which just felt kind of odd because, you know, we weren't witnesses,
00:32:47
but every aspect of the story involves the mother and the sister. >> The first witness was the pathologist
00:32:54
who had performed Angelo's official autopsy. The family didn't know what the pathologist had found. They still hadn't
00:33:02
seen the official autopsy report. But they did know the results of the independent autopsy that they had
00:33:09
ordered and paid for themselves, which had concluded that Angelo had died of asphyxiation.
00:33:17
The independent autopsy had found something called petechial hemorrhages on Angelo,
00:33:23
small red marks often found in the eyes from broken blood vessels. >> Which is important because
00:33:30
they tend to support a finding of an asphyxiation death. >> But the county pathologist testified
00:33:38
that he had found no petechial hemorrhages on Angelo, and he didn't mention any other signs of
00:33:44
asphyxiation. He went over the results of the toxicology report. It showed that Angelo had caffeine in
00:33:52
his system and cotinine from cigarette smoking, as well as a drug for seizures, which is
00:33:58
generally considered safe. Later, the Quinto-Collins family's attorney pointed out that Angelo had
00:34:05
been given anti-seizure medication at the hospital in the days before he died. The pathologist also found a drug called
00:34:13
modafinil, which is also generally considered safe. It's used to treat narcolepsy,
00:34:19
but people sometimes use it off-label to stay awake and alert longer. The pathologist said that the modafinil
00:34:27
could have contributed to Angelo's death. Because, he said, there's a condition linked to drug use
00:34:34
that kills people." He said, quote, "It's poorly understood. It's called excited delirium syndrome."
00:34:49
>> To which there was an audible reaction from the crowd. >> It was shocking, and it was laughable,
00:34:56
and I laughed out loud. Not on purpose, but you know, I just had that reaction. And when I realized that I had done
00:35:04
that, I thought, "Oops." And I walked myself [music] out. >> The pathologist said that Angelo's cause
00:35:10
of death was, quote, "excited delirium syndrome due to acute drug intoxication with behavioral disturbances due to
00:35:19
arrest-related death with physical exertion." [music] In the 8 months since their lawyer had
00:35:27
first told them about excited delirium, Robert says they'd all been learning more.
00:35:33
>> As time went on, it became difficult to think that they would still blame excited delirium because even if
00:35:39
you believed >> [music] >> in the pseudoscience of excited delirium, even if you were to read
00:35:44
their own reports, Angelo didn't fit. That's why there was such a shock in the crowd because we had all become much
00:35:52
more informed about excited delirium. Typically, excited delirium was blamed on people that were taking coke or meth
00:35:58
or something, but to blame it on tobacco >> and caffeine >> cigarettes and this other thing that prevented you
00:36:05
from sleeping, which had never had any deaths, >> Mhm. >> meant that they had the flimsiest case
00:36:12
of excited delirium, even if you went by their own standards. >> Next, Kishard played Bella's 911 call to
00:36:19
the jury. And three of the four police officers who had been at the house in Antioch the
00:36:25
night Angelo was taken to the hospital, testified. Two of the officers said that they'd had
00:36:30
a knee on Angelo, but only very briefly. Originally, the police had said one officer had a knee on him.
00:36:39
Then a detective with the DA's office testified that he had looked at Angelo's old incident when a neighbor had called
00:36:46
the police because Angelo had been acting strangely, trying to climb a fence. The investigator said that according to
00:36:54
the paramedics, Angelo had had a fast heartbeat. And he said a police officer had said
00:37:00
that Angelo had admitted to being on meth. Gishard had said he thought a doctor at
00:37:06
the hospital had believed the same thing. Then Gishard told the jury to not consider what had just been said about
00:37:13
meth because he said it was about a previous incident and there was no evidence of meth in Angelo's blood as
00:37:20
the pathologist had previously testified. After the witness testimonies, Gishard
00:37:28
reminded the jury that they would only be deciding on the cause of death, not who was responsible.
00:37:35
They had four options: homicide, suicide, accident, or natural causes. The jury were told they didn't need to
00:37:45
reach a unanimous decision, but a majority of them would have to agree. Gishard cleared the courtroom while the
00:37:54
jury stayed back to deliberate. After about 15 minutes, they'd reached a unanimous decision.
00:38:02
Were you surprised when the jury ruled it an accident? >> No, not at all. When I heard the uh
00:38:12
the testimony from the coroner that it was excited delirium, then I that's what I expected would happen.
00:38:19
And I felt like that was the intended and that was the purpose of it. >> The Kinto Collins family had filed a
00:38:28
lawsuit against the city of Antioch, its police chief, and the four police officers who were at the family's house
00:38:35
that night in December 2020. Months later, Ben Nissenbaum deposed the county's pathologist.
00:38:43
The pathologist came to his office with a lawyer. >> What happened was I showed him the
00:38:48
pictures from our autopsy that show the petechial hemorrhages in Mr. Kinto's eyes.
00:38:56
And uh so he looked at them and he looked at them again and again and again and again.
00:39:03
And uh Dr. Ogan actually acknowledged that yes, those are petechial hemorrhages and
00:39:11
that [laughter] in his view that they take time to develop and that they simply hadn't developed at the time
00:39:17
that that he did answer those uh autopsy. What he said is that the restraint also
00:39:24
played a role in Mr. Kinto's death. >> The pathologist said that if he had found the petechial hemorrhages when he
00:39:32
did his autopsy, he would have added asphyxiation to his diagnosis. But he still believed the excited
00:39:40
delirium diagnosis was right. >> [music] [music] >> We'll be right back. >> [music]
00:40:07
>> After the idea of excited delirium was proposed in the 1980s, it started gaining momentum.
00:40:14
In In 2008, a 3-day conference on deaths that occurred in police custody was held
00:40:20
at a hotel in Las Vegas. It was sponsored by something called the Institute for the Prevention of
00:40:27
In-Custody Deaths. Speakers included doctors, pathologists, and scientists. One of the speakers was Charles Wetli,
00:40:37
the medical examiner who had theorized that the deaths of a number of women in Miami were due to excited delirium
00:40:44
because they'd had cocaine in their system. In 1995, Charles Wetli had moved to New
00:40:50
York, where he worked as a medical examiner. >> Even though Wetli's theories in Miami were unproven
00:40:57
in that those murder cases, he continued to talk about excited delirium. Reporter Reynu Raism, and he continued
00:41:04
to link cocaine use with excited delirium. He was just really convinced of this idea.
00:41:10
And then this sort of idea really took off in a lot of different ways. >> When the 2008 conference in Las Vegas
00:41:16
was announced, Charles Wetli was introduced as one of the doctors who had identified excited delirium quote, in
00:41:23
the cocaine wild 1980s. The conference promised that, quote, attendees will help make law
00:41:30
enforcement, medical, and legal history through topic-specific breakout groups focused on arriving at a consensus about
00:41:39
excited delirium. The conference was organized by a group that was started by a lawyer
00:41:47
from Taser. >> They make stun guns. They say, "Hey, these stun guns don't kill people.
00:41:54
They're an alternative to kind of other uses of force by police." >> In a later interview with Reuters,
00:42:02
Charles Wetli said that he had studied deaths involving Tasers, and in the vast majority of cases, those
00:42:09
deaths were caused by excited delirium, not the Taser shock. Quote, "I've never seen [music] a case
00:42:16
where I could say that a Taser actually contributed to the death." He told Reuters that Taser had hired him
00:42:24
many times to be an expert witness in lawsuits against the company. Renu Raj >> [music]
00:42:31
>> says that conference on in-custody deaths became a turning point. >> From that conference emerged what ended
00:42:40
up being this really influential white paper on excited delirium. Uh it's called a white paper on excited delirium
00:42:47
syndrome. So, a white paper, it's like a in this sort of medical or scientific context,
00:42:53
a white paper is kind of like a detailed guide or report on a topic. >> The white paper was published by the
00:43:00
American College of Emergency Physicians in 2009. The authors of the paper were 19
00:43:06
doctors, many of them professors of emergency medicine. A few of them had worked with Taser in
00:43:14
some capacity. We reached out to Axon, the company that makes Tasers, for comment.
00:43:21
We didn't hear back. >> So, if you read the paper, you go back and read the 2009 white paper from the
00:43:27
American College of Emergency Physicians, it sort of lays out Okay, what they think excited delirium is, and
00:43:34
it presents this research. Of course, all the research is um it's sort of circular. It's from the same group of
00:43:39
experts that have been talking about the theory in the first place. Um and they say, "Okay, there are no
00:43:45
biological markers for excited delirium." Again, there's no tests or standard diagnostic criteria,
00:43:52
but they lay out what they say are these features. If someone has like superhuman
00:43:57
strength or really high pain tolerance or rapid breathing, then they have excited delirium.
00:44:04
>> The white paper listed other signs that someone might have excited delirium, such as a {quote} failure to respond to
00:44:10
police presence, profuse sweating, and a {quote} attraction to glass or reflective surfaces.
00:44:20
>> I had never heard of this thing called excited delirium, and I I was troubled
00:44:25
and curious. >> In 2020, Argen Bajwa was a medical student doing a research fellowship at a
00:44:32
hospital in Rochester, New York, when a man named Daniel Prude was brought to the intensive care unit after
00:44:39
an incident which included being restrained by police. Argen didn't treat the man, but later he
00:44:46
heard about him and about how his autopsy had listed excited delirium syndrome as a cause of death.
00:44:54
Argen says he asked some of his professors about it, but none of them had heard about excited
00:44:59
delirium syndrome. Groups like the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric
00:45:06
Association, and the WHO didn't recognize it. So, Argen started doing his own research.
00:45:14
>> Well, I just started with Google, like everyone does, and the first things that came up were a lot
00:45:20
of police training uh material. Manuals from police departments across the country, videos about it on YouTube for
00:45:28
training purposes. >> Argen says the training materials he found almost always mentioned superhuman
00:45:34
strength and how to deal with it. >> Somebody with excited delirium can't be taken down with the normal de-escalation
00:45:42
techniques of verbal cues. They say they need many officers. They say that they need many electroshocks.
00:45:50
>> A news organization called New York Focus got access to Rochester police training materials on excited delirium,
00:45:58
created in 2016, and found that a lot of it appeared to come from a poster published by the
00:46:05
Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, the organization that had been started by a lawyer at Taser.
00:46:13
The poster had advice on how to capture someone with excited delirium. Quote, "Taser electronic control devices have
00:46:22
been shown to be the most effective for quickly capturing this category of individuals."
00:46:29
In a police training presentation, a couple of slides had a list of behaviors to look out for.
00:46:36
They included hallucinations and unfounded fear or panic, bizarre behavior, and quote, "saying I
00:46:44
can't breathe." The slides included photos, like one of a naked zombie with blood on
00:46:51
its face, one of the Incredible Hulk, and one of the actor and comedian Jordan Peele with sweat running down his face.
00:47:02
The slide explains the four stages of excited delirium. One, elevated body temperature.
00:47:09
Two, agitation. Three, respiratory arrest. Four, death. >> One of the ideas is that
00:47:18
people with excited delirium, {quote} {unquote}, have reduced pain perception. And they cite instances of them smashing
00:47:28
glass and withstanding multiple electroshocks. Um in that description are all these
00:47:36
very loaded terms with all this baggage, like monster and and animal-like behavior and
00:47:45
extreme strength and um I think that plays on racial stereotypes because overwhelmingly these are
00:47:55
black men, young black men. The second angle is that this question of differences in pain perception
00:48:03
has an embarrassing legacy in medicine, a long legacy of of physicians believing
00:48:09
that people of African descent had different pain perception, require less anesthetic,
00:48:16
have a literally thicker skin, [music] have literally less sensitive nerve endings.
00:48:22
>> [music] >> So, very gruesome things from surgery to experimentation to amputation were
00:48:29
carried out >> [music] >> under that guise. And I think that we see that legacy in this narrative
00:48:39
of people with excited delirium having diminished pain response. >> The organization Physicians for Human
00:48:46
Rights says that the deaths of black people and people of color have disproportionately been attributed to
00:48:53
excited delirium. Excited delirium also came up in George Floyd's case. There's an officer on the tape saying,
00:49:02
"Hey, we think maybe he has excited delirium." At trial, the defense attorney for Derek
00:49:07
Chauvin, who was accused of killing George Floyd, said that Chauvin had been watching for signs of excited delirium
00:49:14
as a quote reasonable police officer because that's what police were trained to do.
00:49:21
A Minneapolis police officer had testified that she trained new officers on how to
00:49:26
recognize the syndrome. The prosecution called the doctor to testify. He said that he believed excited
00:49:34
delirium is real, but that George Floyd had none of the symptoms. Derek Chauvin was convicted of killing
00:49:43
George Floyd. After George Floyd's death and the deaths of a number of other men of color
00:49:50
who had died in police custody in 2019 and 2020, supposedly from excited delirium.
00:49:57
Renu says things began to change. >> I think what really changed the game was video footage of these deaths. And in
00:50:06
particular, George Floyd's death, I think that caused a lot of people to [snorts] take a look at this term. It
00:50:13
forced a lot of groups that had been um supportive of the term to turn away from
00:50:19
it. And under pressure, um the American College of Emergency Physicians in 2021,
00:50:25
they started to backpedal a little bit. And in 2023, the American College of Emergency Physicians retracted that 2009
00:50:33
white paper and they said, "We got it wrong." >> Renu says police departments across the
00:50:39
country have since removed the term excited delirium from their training materials.
00:50:45
>> But I'll give you an example of how just kind of banning the term may not be enough. Um
00:50:51
so, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, they reported that in training materials for the Minneapolis Police Department,
00:50:58
there are these PowerPoint slides and the words excited delirium were crossed out and replaced with the term severe
00:51:06
agitation with confusion and delirium in parentheses. So, yeah, this concept that
00:51:13
um you know, that exists just with a different name. >> Six months before the white paper on
00:51:20
excited delirium was withdrawn, Angelo Quinto's family tried to have the cause of death on his death certificate
00:51:27
changed. After the county pathologist had sat down with Ben Nissenbaum and agreed that
00:51:35
asphyxiation had been a contributing factor in Angelo's death, his family argued that Angelo's death
00:51:42
should have been classified as a homicide. They were not successful. In 2021, >> [music]
00:51:51
>> California Governor Gavin Newsom signed eight new reform bills into law. One of them bans restraints [music]
00:51:59
that can cause asphyxiation. And in 2023, California became the first state to ban
00:52:07
the term excited delirium, as well as related terms such as hyperactive delirium [music]
00:52:13
and exhaustive mania. >> What it's done is to change the way that the cases are resolved by coroners. And we've seen
00:52:24
that have a real effect, I think, >> [music] >> because now much more we see that coroners are including the
00:52:32
restraint >> [music] >> as part of the cause of death. >> In 2024, the Antioch City Council announced that
00:52:42
[music] they decided to settle with Angelo Quinto O'Connell's family for $7.5 million.
00:52:50
After Angelo died on December 26th, [music] 2020, his family kept the presents they'd
00:52:57
wrapped for him that Christmas. They never opened them. >> [music] >> And his mother, Cassandra, told us
00:53:04
that every year at Christmas, they bring out Angelo's presents and put them under
00:53:09
the tree. Since Angelo's death, the city of Antioch launched [music] a new non-police crisis team that will respond
00:53:18
to calls about people in a mental health crisis. Shortly after Angelo died, his sister,
00:53:25
Bella, >> [music] >> who had called 911 that night, told reporters, "Quote, I asked the detectives if there's
00:53:32
another number I should have called, and they told me that there wasn't, [music]
00:53:36
and that I did the right thing. But the right thing would not have killed my brother.
00:53:43
She said, "Now there's somebody else to call." It's named after [music] Angelo. The Angelo Quinto Community Response
00:53:52
Team. >> [music] >> Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nitty Wilson is our senior producer.
00:54:12
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lilly Clark,
00:54:18
[music] Lena Sillison, and Megan Cain. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Somenetti.
00:54:24
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at
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