When Carl Grant awoke from emergency surgery and couldn’t move, he apologized to family gathered around his hospital bed.
In the fog of dementia, the U.S. Marine Corps veteran thought he’d been paralyzed in the Vietnam War. The truth: It was February 2020, he was 68, and a police officer had wrecked the spinal cord in his neck by slamming him onto an emergency room floor.
Grant’s family decided not to correct him. He was already confused enough.
“We left it like that, we didn’t know how he’d react,” his sister, Kathy Jenkins, recalled.
The story of how Grant ended up paralyzed began that Super Bowl Sunday, when Grant drove off from his Georgia home to shop for groceries.
It was to be a quick trip, so he left his cellphone at home and the heater on. Along the way, Grant became disoriented and turned his Kia Optima onto Interstate 20, driving west into the fading light.
More than two hours later, he was in Birmingham, Alabama, using his keys in the dark to try to unlock the door to a stranger’s house. It was a one story brick home, just like his.
The owner called 911. Grant assured responding officers that this was home. They handcuffed Grant, but realized he wasn’t a burglar — he truly thought he lived there. One officer recognized signs of dementia. Back at the precinct, a sergeant would tell officers they should have called medics for an evaluation and notified a supervisor. Instead, police told Grant to move along.
He did and, about an hour later and less than half a mile away, officers responding to a burglary call found Grant sitting in a porch chair. Again Grant insisted he was home, and could prove it with paperwork inside.
Grant stood up and turned toward the front door. Body-camera video shows Officer Vincent Larry telling Grant he couldn’t enter and then shoving him down the porch steps.
Grant was facedown on the ground as Larry and other officers struggled to handcuff him. As they did, Grant cried out, “Call the police!”
These officers also began to recognize signs of confusion — Grant couldn’t tell them the day of the week or year. A sergeant asked Larry if they should take Grant into protective custody. Larry continued with the arrest, saying Grant assaulted him. Larry would write in his report Grant struck him with a closed fist, though he later told internal police investigators the shove caused Grant to turn and punch as he fell.
Larry went with Grant to the…