“You will see that time and time again these officers did nothing to help Shayne,” said attorney Alexandra Valenti. “Instead, they locked him in a cell alone and left him to die.”
She showed jurors photos and surveillance video of Stilphen’s final hours, as he struggled to stand during the detention, then sat slumped in his cell with his face on his knees and his arms awkwardly twisted behind his back. She said he was clearly suffering from substance abuse and needed urgent medical attention before he took any more drugs at the station.
“Any of us could tell Shayne needed help,” Valenti said, adding that the four officers were trained to recognize opioid abuse and had the life-saving overdose drug Narcan on hand at the station but didn’t use it until it was too late. One of those officers was also on duty seven weeks earlier when another man died of an overdose in a cell, she said.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Stilphen’s mother by the law firm Goodwin Procter and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, seeks damages from the four officers for unconstitutionally failing to provide medical care. The suit names the officers as Ismael Almeida, Paul Michael Bertocchi, Catia Freire and Brian Picarello.
U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns told the eight jurors selected to hear the case that they could only find the officers liable if they found they were guilty of conscious indifference, “meaning they knowingly chose to do the wrong thing or to do nothing, even though they knew what the law required.”
The city is also named in the lawsuit, but the trial will take place separately.
In his opening remarks, a lawyer for the officers called Stilphen’s death a “tragedy” but said the officers were not to blame.
“When officers realized Stilphen had overdosed, they did everything they could to save his life,” Randall Maas said, describing how they used Narcan, performed CPR and called emergency medical services.
He pointed to the four officers sitting in the courtroom’s public gallery. Freire and Picarello had just graduated from the police academy the month before Stilphen’s death.
Maas told jurors that police were prohibited from strip-searching Stilphen because he was charged with a nonviolent offense. Valenti also told jurors that the failure to find Stilphen’s drugs before he was taken to the cell was not an issue in the lawsuit.
Maas denied the claim that Stilphen was obviously in distress when he arrived at the police station shortly after 1 a.m. after his arrest on July 14, 2019. Stilphen was able to answer questions, take off his shoes and stand on one leg while being taken into the police station, he said.
“It was a chaotic and busy night at Station D-4,” Maas said, adding that Almeida, who had worked there for 13 years at the time, described it as the busiest night of his career.
While Stilphen was in his cell, Maas said, a SWAT team was called to the station to assist in another case involving a man who became violent and slammed his head against a van after being arrested for assault and attempted rape.
Officers first noticed that Stilphen “needed serious medical attention” when a fifth officer checked on him at 5:51 a.m., entered his cell when he was unresponsive, and discovered the bag containing drug residue, Maas said.
Stilphen’s mother, Lynnel Cox, testified Monday that Shayne was a loving son, brother and friend who had struggled with opioid addiction since he was 16, but repeatedly sought treatment and talked to her about his dream of getting healthy and working as a hairdresser.
“I never gave up hope for him, never,” Cox said. “I never thought he would die in police custody.”
She cried as jurors were shown letters Stilphen had written to her expressing how grateful he was that she had always stood by him and believed in him. The day before he died, she said, they talked about his plan to enter a long-term drug treatment program in Florida.
Cox said she didn’t learn of her son’s death until six hours later, when officials knocked on her door in East Bridgewater to notify her.
“Nobody deserves to die alone,” she said. “I wanted to see him and hold him … and they took that opportunity away from me.”
Shelley Murphy can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @shelleymurph.
