LCSO.
In the spring of 2023, Cape Coral resident Tammy King went to a doctor’s office in nearby St. James City, hoping to refill her prescriptions for medication to treat her ADHD. Instead she was roughed up by Lee County sheriff’s deputies and wrongfully forced into a mental facility, according to a federal lawsuit filed on her behalf.
A photograph of bruising on King taken three days after the run-in with LCSO. (Courtesy: Stacy Maldonado) 49-year-old King wasn’t accused of a crime, a deputy slammed her against a wall in the women’s bathroom of the doctor’s office, pepper-sprayed her in the face, manhandled her into a squad car and made her sit in her own urine in a supermarket parking lot for nearly two hours while waiting for a prisoner transport van, according to King’s account and sheriff’s office records. She then spent another two hours in a steel cage in the back of the van, at times being tossed around violently in transit, before deputies dropped her off at Park Royal Hospital in Fort Myers.
The entire ordeal was a result of her confiding in a nurse practitioner at the doctor’s office that she was feeling stressed and depressed. The same nurse then called the sheriff’s office to hold King under Florida’s Baker Act, which allows for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation and three-day detention of those deemed to pose a risk to themselves or others.
Rather than protect someone they believed to be suffering from a mental health crisis, deputies abused her and violated her civil rights, King alleges in the federal suit naming Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno and several other defendants that includes a trio of deputies.
Now, nearly two years later, she says she’s suffering from PTSD and struggling to resume a normal life due to the events of that day. The emotional fallout from the experience has included “worsened depression, fear, anxiety, nightmares, sleeplessness,” and other ill effects, the lawsuit alleges.
“I literally don’t trust doctors and police anymore,” King told the Florida Trident. “I am definitely afraid of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. Anytime I see a sheriff’s car, my heart goes to my throat.”
The Trident reviewed audio interviews of witnesses and hundreds of pages of documents, including emails, medical reports, emergency and dispatch call logs provided by the sheriff’s office to King’s fraternal twin sister and advocate, Stacy Maldonado of Miami. The records show internal affairs investigators determined the allegations of abuse were unfounded after an inquiry so superficially conducted that King herself wasn’t initially interviewed.
A sheriff’s office spokesperson declined comment, citing the pending litigation. King’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court on April 24, 2024 in Lee County and amended in July, seeks more than $100 million in damages.
King’s brush with Lee County deputies is an egregious example of how law enforcement officers are often poorly trained to handle emergency calls involving people suffering mental illness, said Melba Pearson, an attorney and director at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy.
“The deputies handled this improperly,” said Pearson, who also served as an assistant state attorney in Miami-Dade County for 16 years. “They just dehumanized her when all she needed was help.”
A bad day quickly spirals
On March 24, 2023, King went to Millennium Physician Group’s offices to meet nurse practitioner Kristin Gustin about refilling her medications. According to her sworn account to internal affairs investigators, she and Gustin had struck up a personal friendship while playing together in a local adult kickball league.
During her consultation, King began crying and told Gustin she was feeling sad and depressed because of damage to her house caused by Hurricane Ian, as well as related financial stress and family and relationship problems.
When Gustin asked her if she felt like hurting herself, she replied “absolutely not,” according to King. Nevertheless, Gustin told King she needed to “get checked out.”
“I thought it was a referral for a psychiatrist,” King said in the sworn statement. “We called my sister. I was calm. [Gustin] said, ‘I’m really worried about you driving because you were visibly upset. Do you mind if I get you a ride to the hospital to be evaluated?’”
A few minutes later, the two walked out of the office so King could smoke a cigarette, and after a few minutes, Lee County Sheriff’s Cpl. Jay Brett pulled up in his patrol car, per King’s sworn statement. “[Gustin] never said she was calling a police officer,” King said. “I thought the receptionist or someone else she knew was giving me a ride.”
Gustin, said King, reassured her she was “going to a good place.” When King went into the women’s bathroom to clean up, Cpl. Brett followed her inside and demanded she give him her purse. He would later report he saw a prescription bottle “bulging” from the purse and wanted to seize it in case she planned to overdose. But King said he gave her no explanation whatsoever, and when she refused, a struggle ensued. “He grabbed my purse – it never occurred to me why he needed it or why he walked into the ladies room and kind of blocked me,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Can you tell me what I did wrong?’ It was a tug of war. I said, ‘Fine take it.’”
While King screamed for Gustin to help her, Brett threw her up against the wall and tried to handcuff her. “Then he pepper-sprayed me,” King said. “He wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom, so I urinated in my pants, which was humiliating.”
Brett then walked her out of the office and placed her in the backseat of his patrol car, King told an internal affairs investigator. “He said, ‘You’re lucky I didn’t tase you, bitch. I could have you arrested for hitting me,’” King recalled. “I was screaming in pain because the [pepper-spray] was in my throat. It was in my hair, and because I was sweating and crying, pepper spray kept going into my eyes.”
She said she still had no idea what was happening – and the nightmare was only beginning.
King takes a ride in the ‘Marceno Motel Courtesy Shuttle’
From the Millenium office, Brett drove to the parking lot of a nearby Publix where they waited more than an hour for a prisoner’s transport van, internal affairs investigators confirmed. The Lee County Sheriff’s Office has dubbed the vehicle the “Marceno Motel Courtesy Shuttle,” after the sheriff’s self-referential nickname for the jail.
King told internal affairs that even though her vision was blurred, she could tell they were in a parking lot. “I couldn’t understand why I was just sitting there,” she said.
Eventually Lee sheriff’s van operator Johnathon Armato showed up at the parking lot, according to LCSO records. King said they moved her handcuffs from the back to the front of her body, and put shackles around her ankles. She was then placed into a metal cage inside the van.
“[The van] is going over bumps, stopping and going forward so I am falling over because there is nothing to hold on to,” King said in her sworn statement. “One time I went flying and [Armato] was like, ‘Are you okay?’ He said, ‘We are almost there.’”
But Armato made stops to pick up two more arrestees, who were put in the metal cage next to King.
When the van finally arrived at Park Royal Hospital, healthcare workers poured milk over King’s eyes to help alleviate the sting from the pepper-spray and gave her medication to calm her down, King recalled.
She had no clue what it meant to be hospitalized under Florida’s Baker Act until another patient at Park Royal explained it to King, who claims in the lawsuit that Gustin and other Millennium healthcare workers also deceived her by not explicitly telling her she was being sent to Royal Park for a three-day involuntary evaluation, King said. Millennium, Gustin and physician Francisco Marasigan, whom King alleges falsely signed the Baker Act paperwork attesting he’d examined her, are also named as defendants in the lawsuit. A call and email request for comment made to attorney Tiffany Hampton, who represents all three parties, went unanswered.
“I am the only one who didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “In the [Baker Act] guidelines, it clearly states you have to explain it to the patient so they understand.”
Over the next three days, she participated in group therapy sessions and a nurse asked her if she was feeling suicidal. “I told them I was not trying to hurt myself,” King said. “And that I didn’t know why I was there.”
After the three-day hold, she was released from the hospital.
Initial Internal affairs probe
Five days after the incident, Maldonado filed an internal affairs complaint against Brett, Armato and two other deputies alleging they used excessive force against her sister. The case was assigned to Lt. Stephanie Fretwell, who sent emails to Lt. Paul Paverse and Sgt. Matthew Williams, both of whom oversee prisoner transportations, asking them about King’s account of the van ride, including the use of ankle shackles.
Paverse replied that “only handcuffs were used due to her being compliant at the time of transport.” Williams asserted that King was the only detainee in the van, and that she had no visible injuries.
The internal affairs reports shows Fretwell did not interview Brett, Armato or the other two deputies named in the lawsuit, Melquias Olivo and Jason Ward. In a sworn affidavit, Brett claimed he asked for King’s purse after he saw a prescription bottle — her medication for ADHD — “bulging” from the top of it and wanted to make sure she didn’t “retrieve/digest anything to harm herself.”
He claimed King “slammed her purse” into his chest with her left hand and pushed him back with her right hand. “Due to being battered, Cpl. Brett attempted to handcuff King,” the affidavit states. “To prevent self-injury and active resistance, Cpl. Brett pepper-sprayed her in the face.”
Gustin, the nurse practitioner, gave a sworn statement to Fretwell on April 27, 2023. Gustin did not say if she explained to King that she was being hospitalized under the Baker Act, but told IA that her friend was not well. “She was a little bit frantic, crying on and off,” Gustin said. “She was being cooperative at that time.”
Gustin said she saw Brett and King going back-and-forth and a “little bit of shoving,” but that she could not remember if he said anything to King about why he wanted her purse. She could smell the pepper-spray, but did not see Brett deploy it. Gustin also admitted to hearing King plead for help. “I can’t get in the middle of that,” Gustin told the detective. “She wasn’t resisting.”
The same day, after concluding her interviews with Gustin and other Millenium staffers, Fretwell closed the investigation as unfounded. Her initial report also noted that King had refused to provide a statement because she was scared.
King and Maldonado refute findings
Both Maldonado, who was helping her sister provide information to Internal Affairs, and King disputed that she’d been uncooperative. They contacted the head of IA, Capt. Travis Hicks, to set up an appointment for a sworn statement, which took place on May 19, 2023. Maldonado also provided Hicks with photos of her sister’s bruises and marks around her ankles immediately following King’s release from the hospital.
Based on King’s statements during her interview, Hicks and Fretwell “determined additional investigation would be conducted into when leg shackles were placed on Tammy…and the transport of Tammy to Park Royal.”
That’s when Fretwell finally questioned Cpl. Brett, who told her he “was unaware of what information Tammy was provided prior to his arrival,” but he told her “he needed her purse and she could not take it in” to Millennium’s bathroom, the IA report states.
Brett also admitted he had shackled King’s ankles “due to her initial behavior and [for] her safety.” He told IA he removed the shackles before she was placed in the van and said the reason it took so long to transport King from the doctor’s office to the hospital was because he had to wait for Millennium staffers to provide him with medical paperwork required for the Baker Act transport.
Olivo, a van operator, also confirmed that two inmates were picked up while they transported King, refuting the previous claim by supervisor Williams that she was the only person in the transport van. Olivo said King was by herself in one of three metal enclosed cages in the van and he was able to monitor her through one of the openings and saw no signs of distress.
In her report, Fretwell noted that Lee County Sheriff’s Office policy allows inmates and individuals who have been Baker Acted to be transported together “in an attempt to provide a better overall service to the citizens of Lee County.” This practice allows “a deputy to go back into service faster and to be able to respond to calls,” she wrote.
While Fretwell acknowledged that King “was unaware a Lee County Sheriff’s Office deputy was completing an involuntary Baker Act,” the lieutenant concluded Brett and the other deputies did not violate any departmental policies and regulations.
The IA probe was closed a second time as “unfounded.” The investigators determined Brett did not violate any sheriff’s policies for using pepper-spray on King, failing to explain to her why she was being detained, and for leaving her to sit in her own urine.
“I am still dealing with the pain and humiliation of peeing in my pants and sitting in it for hours,” King told the Trident. “I felt like a caged animal, and I am not over it. Even if I win the lawsuit, it would not be justice.”
FIU’s Pearson said the mistreatment of King shows Lee County deputies need better training on how to deal with people in mental health crises.
‘The best practice right now is to have a crisis intervention unit or train officers on how to deal with a mental health patient,” Pearson said. “[Deputies] need to be able to tell people what is happening and get them the help they need.”
In 2021, more than a dozen Lee County Sheriff’s deputies and civilian employees participated in a training class by the Southwest Florida chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to educate them on how to properly respond to someone in mental distress. Neither the sheriff’s office nor local NAMI vice president Vacharee Howard responded to questions from the Trident regarding that training.
The violent confrontation could have been avoided, said Pearson, had the sheriff’s office utilized social workers who could meet deputies at the scene to de-escalate any possible tension with mental health patients.
“If you don’t have the proper tools and you only use a hammer, everything is going to look like a nail,” she said. “I hope her federal lawsuit will result in a change in policy so no one has to endure that sort of treatment again.”
This story was produced by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a nonprofit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state. About the author: Francisco Alvarado is an investigative journalist based in Miami whose work has appeared in The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.