Sonoma County District Attorney clears Rohnert Park police officers in Taser death

Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch said Rohnert Park police acted lawfully during an 2017 encounter with a Forestville man who died of cardiac arrest while officers tried to arrest him.|

No criminal charges will be filed against the Rohnert Park public safety officers involved in the death of a Forestville man who had a heart attack after being shocked with an electric stun gun and restrained by police last year, Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch said.

Branch Wroth, 41, died May 12, 2017, during an encounter with police in a room at the Budget Inn on Redwood Drive in Rohnert Park. Motel staff called police, describing Wroth as a “very disoriented person” who didn’t vacate the room by check-out time, officials said.

Wroth stopped breathing and lost consciousness as he was being held on the ground with his hands and feet restrained behind his back by multiple officers, according to the report and body camera footage.

Wroth, who was under the influence of methamphetamine, had tried to stop police from putting him in handcuffs. Prosecutors found the four officers and one sergeant acted lawfully while detaining Wroth and none of their actions “created a substantial risk of death or great bodily injury,” according to the 30-page document reporting their findings released this month.

Ravitch said Wroth’s death was likely caused by his drug intoxication combined with physical exertion resisting police, a conclusion strongly contested by Wroth’s family.

“It’s an unfortunate outcome, but we found no criminal liability,” Ravitch said in an interview last week.

Wroth’s family is suing the city and officers in an ongoing federal civil rights case filed last year in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The family claims the officers recklessly disregarded Wroth’s rights during the encounter when police were called to check his welfare.

Their attorney, Izaak Schwaiger, called Ravitch’s report “a whitewash.” He said officers shouldn’t have used such force - multiple shocks with a stun gun, strikes with fists and a flashlight, forcing him facedown on the ground and pulling his arms and legs back in a “hogtie” - because there was no need to arrest Wroth, who was incoherent and in medical distress.

Wroth had a misdemeanor warrant because he had unexcused absences from a court-ordered drunken-driving class, an issue that could have been handled with a citation, Schwaiger said.

“There’s no way a reasonable person could view the force being used as reasonable,” Schwaiger said. “You can watch him die before those officers’ eyes. You can hear him saying he can’t breathe and then he dies.”

Dr. Arnold Josselson, a pathologist hired by Sonoma County to conduct an autopsy, classified Wroth’s death as a homicide. The finding doesn’t imply criminal liability, but it means Wroth died at the hands of another, sheriff’s officials said.

Josselson determined the cause of death was “cardiopulmonary arrest (heart attack) immediately after a struggle with law enforcement, while under the influence of methamphetamine,” according to the district attorney’s report.

The primary police personnel involved in attempting to detain Wroth were officers David Wattson, Sean Huot, his brother, Matt Huot, Mike Werle and Sgt. Eric Matzen. They all remain active employees with the city’s public safety department, said Don Schwartz, the assistant city manager.

The encounter with Wroth began calmly and remained so for several minutes. Wattson, the first officer to arrive at the room, tried to persuade Wroth to put on his clothes and allow the officer to handcuff him while examining the details of the warrant, according to the district attorney’s report and footage from police body cameras shown to a Press Democrat reporter by Schwaiger, the Wroth family attorney.

Wattson asked a second officer on scene to stay outside the room. Wroth was initially calm, though he was breathing heavily and appeared confused, unable to quickly answer simple questions like where he lived. Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, naked, Wroth told the officers he believed he was poisoned by the detergent in his clothing and didn’t want to put his clothes on.

“These are drenched with chemicals,” he said in the body cam video.

An officer asked Wroth to stand up so he could be handcuffed. Wroth seemed confused, asking the officer what kind of insurance he had.

Several minutes into the encounter, Wattson and Sean Huot gripped Wroth’s arms and tried to stand him up. Wroth responded by lunging toward a nearby window in the small hotel room, pushing out the screen and attempting to crawl outside, according to the district attorney’s report.

The officers struggled to pull Wroth back into the room, punching and elbowing Wroth several times in the back. Wattson then shocked Wroth with a Taser, which helped to bring him back into the room, the report said.

Yelling “help me help me” while on the ground, Wroth continued to resist and Wattson fired the Taser again. Wattson fired his Taser six times within one minute, according to a post-incident analysis of the device, although the weapon’s records don’t indicate how many of the shocks made contact with Wroth.

Other officers and the sergeant joined the effort to control Wroth, described in the report as 5 feet 8½ inches tall and 238.5 pounds.

Sobbing, Wroth said in a muffled voice “I can’t breathe,” according to the video. About ?50 seconds later Wroth’s hands went limp, the recording showed.

Werle noticed the back of Wroth’s neck was purple and asked the officers to check his face, the report said. Officers rolled Wroth over and tried to revive him, calling for someone to get a defibrillator. About that point, one officer is heard in the video saying “cameras off” and another officer stated that his camera was on.

Wroth was pronounced dead at 4 p.m., about 50 minutes after motel staff called police, according to the district attorney’s report.

Schwartz declined to answer specific questions about the case, including a question about whether department policy instructs officers to turn off their body-worn cameras while trying to revive an unconscious subject in police custody. Schwartz said it was “inappropriate to comment on matters at issue” in the federal civil rights case.

Ravitch said her investigation did not consider whether the officers followed agency policy or used excessive force. The review is intended to determine whether their actions were “reasonably necessary under the circumstances to accomplish a lawful law enforcement purpose” or violated criminal law, according to the report.

“My job is not to remark upon policies used by a department and whether those policies were followed,” Ravitch said. “This was an independent evaluation of whether or not the conduct of the involved officers rises to the level of a criminal act. That’s the scope of the investigation.”

Sonoma County sheriff’s detectives - under a countywide protocol that calls for another agency to investigate officer-involved deaths - interviewed 10 police and first responders involved in the incident as well as four hotel staff and two security guards. They reviewed body camera videos recorded from multiple officers.

Rohnert Park city officials denied a Press Democrat request for copies of the body-worn camera recordings taken during the incident. Schwaiger, the Wroth family’s attorney, showed some of the videos to a Press Democrat reporter, but declined to release the videos for public dissemination, claiming it would harm Wroth’s parents, Christopher and Marni Wroth of Mount Shasta in Siskiyou County.

“Among his first sentences to the officers as they arrive is, ‘Please don’t kill me.’ Right there on film,” Schwaiger said.

The district attorney’s report also includes information about Wroth’s criminal history.

His convictions stemmed from mostly nonviolent offenses, showing a pattern of drug use and delusional behavior. Ravitch said she included Wroth’s criminal history because she believed it shows he had repeated encounters with law enforcement and resisted arrest in the past.

On Dec. 8, 2016, Wroth was spotted barefoot wearing only underwear in a Penngrove field waving his arms and acting strangely, according to the district attorney’s report. He told sheriff’s deputies he was stressed out and claimed to be living like a Native American, according to the report. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

On April 1, 2017, Petaluma police were called to the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility and found Wroth naked, sunburned and covered in mud and algae. He told officers he had been taking a test that required him to swim, bike and climb. They arrested him on suspicion of trespassing.

Schwartz said the Rohnert Park Public Safety Department has not conducted an internal administrative review of the incident or the officers’ actions. Most law enforcement agencies examine cases of force when an individual dies to determine whether officers followed department policy.

Schwartz said the department will conduct a review of the incident now that the district attorney’s report is complete and will likely hire an outside firm to conduct the review.

“Are there any lessons to be learned? I think we’re always trying to get better,” Schwartz said. “Were policies followed and based on this experience do we think we have the right policies? Is there anything to gain from this? I have no reason to think there is, but it’s the kind of question one can ask in these circumstances.”

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.

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