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A Salt Lake City detective really wanted to get a blood sample of a blood sample of an unconscious patient he was investigating, but the nurse at the hospital refused. She said that it went against the hospital’s policy to not draw blood from a patient without their consent unless their is a warrant for that patients arrest or if that person was already arrested. The patient didn’t fit into either category and the nurse insisted to the officer that she is unable to comply to his demands. As a result, he put her under arrest, as she screamed all the way out of the building.
Officer Jeff Payne finds himself in a heap of trouble over this recent arrest of a Utah nurse. The Salt Lake City police department has put Payne on paid leave. Meanwhile nurse Alex Wubbels says she was “assaulted and illegally arrested” by Officer Payne.
However, according to Payne’s report, he was instructed by his superior officer Lt. James Tracy that if the nurse doesn’t comply with the order to draw blood then she would be arrested for interfering with an investigation.
Payne claimed he wanted to get that sample to “protect” the patient rather than punish him. Payne also wanted to see if the patient had any illicit substances in his system at the time of the crash, and was allegedly responding to a request from Logan police to solicit a sample of the patients blood. The unconscious patient had been injured since a July 26 car crash in Northern Utah, which killed the other driver.
Wubbels is frantic as she is dragged out of the hospital by Payne. She yells out, “Help! Help! Somebody help me! Stop! Stop! I did nothing wrong!”
Federal law backs up this nurse and the unconscious patient. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the Constitution does allow warrantless breath tests in drunken-driving arrests, however it does not warrantless blood tests.
“I can’t sit on this video and not attempt to speak out both to re-educate and inform,” said Nurse Wubbels. Police agencies “need to be having conversations about what is appropriate intervention.”
Wubbels has not been charged of any crime. She says that she has already watched the video of her arrest four to five times, and “it’s hard to relive it.”
Even the mayor of Salt Lake City is backing up this nurse. Mayor Jackie Biskupski released a statement on the incident that now has gone viral. The mayor said, “Like many of you, I watched the video of police officers interacting with University of Utah Medical Center nurse Alex Wubbles for the first time through the media late yesterday. What I saw is completely unacceptable to the values of my Administration and of the values of the Salt Lake City Police Department. I extend a personal apology to Ms. Wubbles for what she has been through for simply doing her job.”
As a result of the hospital incident on July 26, Officer Payne has been suspended with pay from the department’s blood draw program. He has been placed on paid leave pending an investigation.
