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Sep. 27--Kathleen Copelin Pastula wanted to see the sheriff of her county.
Perhaps naively, she went to the El Dorado County sheriff's office without an appointment to discuss with him her daughter's substance abuse problem and two experiences stemming from her daughter's condition that Pastula had with deputies within the previous 72 hours.
A 56-year-old housewife and mother of four, she was looking for answers, trying to cope with the worst kind of trouble a parent can face.
Pastula never got the meeting she wanted. Instead she became embroiled in an ordeal that would involve a night in jail, two courts, a criminal charge dismissed and a check written to her to settle a civil lawsuit.
Until Feb. 10, 2008 -- three days before her visit to the sheriff's office -- she had never had an encounter with law enforcement. She was jailed on that date when a deputy allowed her daughter to make a "citizen's arrest" based on Pastula seizing a large supply of Xanax her daughter obtained from a physician unaware of her history of addiction.
Pastula had learned that her daughter planned to trade the Xanax for street drugs, according to her attorney, Stewart Katz.
She was not charged with a crime in connection with that arrest.
When Sgt. Jeff Dreher told Pastula she could not see Sheriff Jeff Neves and could not make an appointment with him, he ordered her to leave the office. She refused.
An angry Dreher "threw her into a glass-faced display case, twisted her arm and forced her face-first to the (floor) -- and -- arrested her," according to Pastula's civil rights lawsuit in Sacramento federal court.
"It went from zero to 60 in 10 seconds," said Katz in an interview Saturday. "Instead of trying to run her off, why didn't he tell her the sheriff was not even on the premises, which was true, or just give her a complaint form to take with her and fill out?"
Pastula was transported to jail in Placerville, "where she was tasered, forced to remove all of her clothing and denied emergency medical and psychiatric care," the suit alleged.
"It was her second time in jail in two days after never being in trouble in her life," Katz noted.
Based on Dreher's report, Pastula was charged with resisting arrest. On the trial's second day, after hearing all the witnesses, El Dorado Superior Court Judge James R. Wagoner threw the case out and excused the jury.
"I just do not see how a reasonable jury, having heard this information, this testimony, and evaluating the conduct, could find that Ms. Pastula had violated" the law, Wagoner told the attorneys.
"You could believe everything the cop said and there still wouldn't be a crime," Katz added.
El Dorado Chief Assistant County Counsel Edward Knapp strongly disagreed.
"A reasonable person could decide she had done the crime charged," he declared in an interview Friday.
The civil suit, filed June 8, was settled on Aug. 13 with the county agreeing to pay Pastula $127,000. The resolution came so quickly the county had not yet responded to the suit. U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr. dismissed it Wednesday.
Knapp's rendition of events differs markedly from Pastula's.
"She was acting totally out of control, and they thought she was headed toward the display case to smash it, and was going to injure herself in the process," Knapp said of the incident at the sheriff's office.
Dreher "grabbed her and a tussle starts. You know how things tend to escalate in circumstances like this."
Knapp said deputies may actually have saved Pastula's life at the jail.
"She began choking herself with the drawstring of her hooded sweatshirt, and she was fighting them so hard they couldn't get her hand out from under the string," he said. "She was losing consciousness. They tasered her to get her hand free from the string."
Her suit claimed officers then demanded she remove all her clothing and, when she did not comply, "was dragged down the hall to an isolation cell. Pastula either lost consciousness or blocked out what transpired" next.
"What she remembers -- is waking up nude, covered in urine and excrement and covered partly by a 'safety' garment.
"Later, Pastula begged officers for a blanket, but they simply laughed at her," the suit alleged. She "spent the evening praying, believing her life was in imminent danger."
Knapp said, "There is a tendency to believe that if you pay a lot of money, you must have done something wrong. That's not true in civil rights cases. If there is so much as a dollar awarded in damages, the defendant is on the hook for the plaintiff's attorney's fees, which could easily run into six figures."
In Pastula's case, Knapp said, "She got maybe half what we would have paid our own attorney for a trial."
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Call The Bee's Denny Walsh, (916) 321-1189.
