A civil rights lawsuit has been filed against the Hercules Police Department and three officers over an April 2024 incident in which the officers forcibly restrained and tased a 21-year-old man who had just suffered his first-ever grand mal seizure.

Jack Bruce was reportedly driving along Refugio Valley Road last April when he lost concsiousness and began having a seizure. Other drivers behind him saw his car drift off the road and end up in a ditch, and a Hercules police officer, Officer Angel Garcia, soon arrived on the scene and got into the back of Bruce's car and began talking to him.

Bodyworn camera video from the incident, seen below via KTVU, shows Garcia repeatedly trying to get Bruce to respond to him, while Bruce, slumped in the driver's seat and initially with one leg up on the dashboard, appears only barely conscious.

Someone off-camera, Officer Joshua Goldstein, tells Garcia, "He's having a seizure, leave him be."

After a few minutes, Bruce appears to revive a bit, and while he can speak, he seems very confused and responds badly to the officers touching him. At one point, he reaches for his seatbelt as if to buckle up and continue driving, and Officer Garcia tells him he is in a ditch and threatens to "rip" the seatbelt if he reaches for it again.

EMTs from the fire department arrive, and when the police officers ask the EMTs if they want help getting Bruce out of the car, they say yes. At this point, Bruce becomes combative, and one officer can be heard yelling "Stop fucking resisting!"

"The officers and the medics need to realize that the treatment for a seizure is time," says attorney David Fiol, who is representing Bruce, speaking to KTVU. "Give him time to come back to his senses. That's all they needed to do."

Craig Peters of Altair Law in San Francisco adds, "It seems like the officers were acting like a hammer and everything they saw was a nail. Like there is only one way to approach a scene and this is a scene that needed a different approach."

As the Chronicle reports, Bruce was bloodied and injured in the incident, tased three times, and once forcibly extracted from the car, he was taken to Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, where he was diagnosed with a seizure, and he discovered he has epilepsy. He suffered back pain that required one week of bed rest.

Epileptics, after experiencing a seizure, enter what's called a postictal state, which is a period of altered brain function that can last up to 30 minutes. This can be characterized by drowsiness, confusion, frustration, and combativeness.

"Agitated behavior during an [epileptic] episode should not be perceived as deliberate hostility or resistance to the officer," says the California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) guidelines, as the Chronicle notes.

The 25-page lawsuit filed this week alleges excessive force, battery, false arrest, negligence, defamation, and violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It names the Hercules Police Department, Chief of Police Joseph Vasquez, Officers Angel Garcia and Michael Thompson, and Corporal Joshua Goldstein as defendants.

The suit alleges that the officers wrote an incident report that accused Bruce of attacking them, and driving under the influence of drugs — naming a sedative that was administered to him by paramedics. And it alleges that Chief Vasquez instructed them via email to accuse Bruce of domestic violence.

"I really don't like seeing the cops now," Jack Bruce said speaking to KTVU — and the station adds that Bruce's own dad was a Richmond police officer for 27 years. "I'm paranoid about having another seizure again. I'm very frustrated because I don't want this to happen to anyone else — or me — again."