Tennessee family’s lawsuit against police, paramedics over use of force dismissed

Nashville, Tennessee (AP) — A lawsuit alleging Bristol, Tennessee, police officers and paramedics used excessive force on a 23-year-old man having a seizure and failed to give him access to medical care has been dismissed.

A federal judge ruled Monday in favor of the city of Bristol and the officers and paramedics, who argued the statute of limitations had expired by the time the family of Austin Hunter Turner filed the lawsuit over his 2017 death.

His death was one of more than 1,000 nationally that an investigation led by The Associated Press identified as happening after police officers used physical force or weapons that were supposed to stop, but not kill, people.

Turner’s mother, Karen Goodwin, filed the lawsuit in 2024 after AP reporters shared police body-camera video they had found. His mother had not seen the video, which made the family doubt the autopsy report conclusion that he died of a multiple drug toxicity. An attorney for the family said they intend to appeal the decision.

The lawsuit focused on how the video contradicted the police version of what happened inside Turner’s apartment after his girlfriend called 911 for medical help.

Attorneys representing the city of Bristol, the paramedics and some of the officers involved declined to comment when reached by the AP on Tuesday.

The officers had said they shocked him with a Taser and physically restrained him face down because he was fighting paramedics. The lawsuit says the video shows Turner was not punching or kicking and he was not disobeying the paramedics because he was in the middle of a seizure.

The lawsuit says the video shows police and paramedics put “significant pressure on the back of Mr. Turner’s head and upper back while Turner was face-down, in the prone position, with a spit sock covering his airway, hands cuffed behind his back and legs shackled.”

David Randolph Smith, an attorney for Turner’s mother, said in a statement to the AP they respectfully disagree with the judge’s interpretation of when the statute of limitations began.

“In our case, the state’s official autopsy affirmatively and incorrectly attributed Austin’s death to ‘multiple drug toxicity as a consequence of recreational drug use’ and it was not until 2023 – when body‑camera footage surfaced and a forensic pathologist reviewed the evidence — that Karen Goodwin first learned restraint‑induced asphyxia, not drugs, caused his death,” said Smith, the family’s attorney in a statement. “We intend to appeal and will ask the Court of Appeals to hold that families in this position are entitled to their day in court when they could not reasonably have discovered the true cause of death until long after the fact, through no fault of their own, but because of misinformation and omissions by government actors.”

The AP’s investigation found that in the cases they analyzed, officers violated well-known guidelines for safely restraining and subduing people, such as pinning people face down in ways that could restrict their breathing or stunning them repeatedly with Tasers.

Attorneys for the city, police and paramedics argued that because Goodwin was present in the apartment and was aware that the officers were using force on her son, she only had one year from that day to file the lawsuit.

Goodwin’s attorneys said the case involved a cover-up that would change the date when the family had to file a lawsuit. They tried to argue that clock shouldn’t start until AP reporters shared the police video with the family in August 2023, as part of their investigation with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University.