“The subject stopped breathing”
18-year-old Kevin Colindres, who has autism, is in a coma tonight in a hospital in Coral Gables, Florida.
On Tuesday night, police responded to a call from Kevin’s sister that, after an “altercation” with his 40-year-old mother, Alma Colindres, regarding his not wanting to attend a Bible study group, Kevin “”was having a violent episode and hitting everyone in the home,’” in the words of Angel Calzadilla, executive assistant to Miami Police Chief John Timoney. The December 15th Miami Herald notes that a female officer first appeared in response to the sister’s phone call. The female officer calmed Kevin; things worsened after “three or four” backup officers arrived.
Kevin ended up outside the home on a neighbor’s lawn scuffling with the officers, [family attorney Stuart] Grossman said. His wrists were restrained behind his back with metal handcuffs. His legs were tied with a leather strap that was looped through the handcuffs. An officer held the strap, Grossman said, and could pull on it to reduce the slack.
”Imagine being on the ground in a device that looks like a dog’s leash,” Grossman said. “An officer is standing over him holding that leash.”
Calzadilla said officers used the hobble device because he “was still thrashing around and kicking.”
Calzadilla declined to discuss precisely what happened after officers restrained the teen, saying only: “The subject stopped breathing.”
When Kevin’s father, Melvin Colindres, came home, Kevin was in the hobble device, which was “‘very tight’”; he was bleeding from his chin. Alma Colindres noted that her son was not breathing: “Officers told the family that Kevin was merely ”exhausted,” Colindres said. It was ten minutes later before an ambulance was called and five more minutes before paramedics arrived.
Kevin’s family has kept a constant vigil in his hospital room.
I am thinking about the Colindres, and most of all about Kevin.
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POSTED IN: Disability Rights, Family, Safety
8 opinions for “The subject stopped breathing”
Kassiane
Dec 16, 2006 at 1:14 pm
And it got this far over PRAYER GROUP.
He’s 18. *sigh*
When will they learn we aren’t perpetual children and have the right to say NO?
And cops, gah. Just gah. One almost killed me when I was having a seizure. If I had more room on my medicalert it’d say “no cops-will sue your pants off”
Kristina Chew, PhD
Dec 16, 2006 at 1:58 pm
The article notes that the police had some kind of crisis intervention training—-it seems especially sad that the first policewoman seemed to have calmed him down, and then things got worse after more officers came.
Leila
Dec 16, 2006 at 2:17 pm
His ignorant family didn’t seem to have much clue about their own kid. The cops used unnecessary violence. What a tragedy.
Daisy
Dec 16, 2006 at 4:41 pm
I feel for the family — and for the first officer to arrive. It sounds like she knew how to de-escalate the situation. Her co-horts, however, did not.
Again, I recommend the book “Dangerous Encounters” for families and law enforcement. I found a used copy on Amazon.
Kassiane
Dec 17, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Call me mean, nasty, unempathetic, whatever, but i can’t feel too sorry for the family.
They’re the ones who re-escalated by calling police who they knew didn’t have training. They’re the ones who didn’t tell them to STOP.
Honestly, I hope his sister is feeling really really really like something that needs to be scraped off a shoe. And I hope his parents aren’t feeling much better about themselves.
NEVER call someone untrained when dealing with invisible neurological differences. NEVER. Yeah, that includes most paramedics & partial seizures, not just cops & autism.
So. The only person who has any right to sympathy here is Kevin. But I sure hope that charges are levied against those cops. “Calm Enough” needs to be in their vocabulary. It isn’t.
*has been postictal and chased under a computer desk by cops. Is small. Cop wasn’t. Had all kinds of threats yelled at her. Screamed loudly enough to crack computer monitor to shut the man up*
Kristina Chew, PhD
Dec 17, 2006 at 10:49 pm
It sounds like too little was known too late……and tragically.
Thanks for the book suggestion, Daisy.
Autism Vox » My Testimony on the New Jersey Autism Bills
Mar 5, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[…] This kind of understanding and awareness about autism is equally crucial for emergency personnel including emergency medical technicians, police officers, and firefighters, as sadly illustrated by the tragic death of Kevin Colindres. Kevin Colindres was an 18-year-old man with autism who lived in Miami. On December 12, 2006, police responded to calls from Colindres’ family that he was having an “altercation” with family members; Colindres was restrained by the officers. Colindres stopped breathing and went into a coma. He died on January 5th in the hospital. The tragic experience of Kevin Colindres and of his family is one that we strongly hope will not occur again, and an autism awareness program in which emergency personnel learn about autism, some of the communication difficulties of autistic persons, and much more is more than necessary. […]
David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction)
Sep 17, 2008 at 6:07 pm
I’m with Kassie.
What I’d want to know is how the fuck it got that far over an adult autistic person not wanting to go to a bloody prayer meeting! If the parents are THAT bound up in their religion, I’m not sure that it isn’t a ‘mania’ thing with them, rather than a real and ‘understandable’ involvement in church activity.
And - as Kassie has said - the family DID in fact re-escalate the situation, after having started it in the first place. Is a prayer meeting really worth this much hassle and the sadness that has evidently followed it?
NO!
And, for those who work in the security field (including police), it is STUPID to assume that the person ‘going off on one’ is the person who caused the problem! That’s why we have functional behavioural assessment! To determine possible causes of situations just like that!!!!
And the family… sorry, but I’m personally with Kassie there, in that they started the thing off. However, behind a family that manages to get this far in - basically - messing up, there’s usually a set of social services ‘professionals’ failing to provide adequate support to that family. So, they should be the ones to carry the can, really.
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