Pictures of Eleanor last year, shortly before the beating. Click for larger image.
I met up with Eleanor Hernandez, police beating victim, a week or two ago at Sweetelle Cafe, but before I could write my story about her she up and died – this past Thursday. We’re still trying to determine the exact cause of her death, and whether or not it, along with the severe mental and physical deterioration over the past eleven months, can be attributed to her July 2013 beating. This is how she came across when I met her:
Let me go back a bit. At the time of her 53rd birthday, less than a year ago, Eleanor Hernandez was bipolar and had HIV and Hep C (with no notable ill health effects) but she was still vivacious, fun-loving and active. The Santa Ana resident decided to spend her birthday money at the Target in Garden Grove, but when she got home she discovered that she’d bought two identical dresses. So she went back to return one of them; when they refused to pay her back cash but only a card, she became angry, cursed at them and left.
When she returned the next day, for another attempt to get her money back, she felt her sleeve grabbed roughly by a female Garden Grove police cadet behind her. “Are you Eleanor Hernandez?” the cadet asked, and escorted her out into the parking lot, where she was hogtied and beaten by this cadet, who also (according to the witness Randy Howell who was her caretaker and boyfriend) stomped on the cuffs on her back as she laid on her stomach. Was she resisting before being hogtied? I imagine so, but the police violence certainly seems excessive. She was taken off to the jail at the GG police station, and when her daughter Ellen came to pick her up, she was bloody and bruised, with a “lump on her head the size of a tennis ball.” [according to Ellen.]
Ellen and Randy then took Eleanor to Garden Grove hospital, where according to them, the police chief himself was there apologizing for the incident and attempting damage control. They also say that the hospital refused her admission when they saw that police violence was involved.
So off they went to Fountain Valley Hospital, closer to Ellen’s home, where Eleanor was treated for her head and body trauma and stayed for a couple of days. [We’re still awaiting the hospital records from that stay.]
Since that July 24 attack, Eleanor’s mental and physical condition gradually deteriorated to the state you see above. As she says in the video, she was having “two or three seizures” a day; Ellen cared for her as best as she could, along with Ellen’s own children, but sometimes Eleanor would wander off. Sometimes she would fall. Often she wouldn’t remember what she did.
A few months ago, wandering through the aisles of the Santa Ana’s First & Main RiteAid, she picked up some Fix-i-dent for her dentures, opened it up, used a little, absent-mindedly stuck it in her purse, and got a petty theft ticket. This was something attorney Matt Pappas was attempting to get thrown out for her (read his letter to T-Rack) … but it hardly seems a problem any more.
When Matt asked me to meet with her and Ellen a couple weeks ago, I could see the difficulty she had moving and expressing herself; according to Matt’s paralegal it was much worse even than when they first met a few months ago. When she saw the year-old photos I posted above, she marveled slowly, “I was sexy!” The high point of the visit was playing Tic-Tac-Toe with her on a big wooden board – I let her win – she said she loved anything that made her use her brain.
The paralegal and I sent Ellen off with instructions to get all her medical records from the hospital, and then see if there was parking lot video from the Target, before letting on to the GG police that we were planning anything. Why did this family wait so long to find a lawyer and seek justice? Mostly financial difficulty; it took a while to find someone like Matt who would take this on pro bono.
In any case, I lost touch with Ellen for a week or two – it turns out Eleanor had gotten sick [a bad cold or pneumonia, it’s not clear] and went back to Fountain Valley Hospital, and Ellen had not been able to do the investigating we’d asked her to. Last Wednesday and Thursday it seemed Eleanor was recuperating, and she was about to be discharged, but then, suddenly, Thursday, she died!
At this point there still has not been a thorough autopsy conducted with the knowledge of her beating. The hospital noted that she had HIV and Hep C, and put her sudden death down to complications from those viruses. But you don’t just suddenly die from either of those conditions! We would like to see a serious autopsy, but the small family is divided, between those who want justice and answers, and those who want to sweep it all under the rug, not make any trouble, cremate the body before any serious autopsy can be done, because “no money will bring her back.”
If that happens, this could be a story about the working class’ and Latinos’ fear of the police, and a story about how often do things like this happen that we just never hear about? It might also be a story of the shame people feel about their mentally ill relatives.
But this is definitely also a story of how we should, as my colleague Diane Goldstein wrote recently, bring the highly successful “Memphis Model” of dealing with the mentally ill to Orange County. How differently might everything have turned out if, instead of a police cadet eager to prove her tough stuff to her colleagues, the July 24 Target call had been responded to by a “Crisis Intervention Team” trained to deal with mentally ill people like Eleanor Hernandez or Kelly Thomas?
Stay tuned to this blog for any new developments on the tragic case of Eleanor Hernandez.
She looks drugged in the video…is it from medication? Yet another tragic story involving the police. I’m guessing this cadet is back on the job…waiting for her next victim. Hopefully the family will sue the holy shit out of the SA PD.
SAPD? why, is because she got a ticket?
Not drugs, Inge. Brain damage.
The above account states that Ms. Hernandez was taken to the GG jail and later released. Was she charged with a crime? What was the official reason for arresting her in the first place? There seems to be several very important unanswered questions.
May I say that an apology by the GG Police Chief may have been a nice gesture it is far to little and far too late.
What is needed in all of these cases where the police interaction with the public at first glance seems to be police abuse or at least police overreaction is swift justice.
It is both scary and very sad that we see case after case after case where the bully behavior or the gang type behavior is being conducted by law enforcement.
POBAR must be either totally repealed or at least greatly weakened so that the public has an even chance at justice when a bad encounter with law enforcement occurs.
The number of questionable law enforcement use of force cases are getting so large that it seems that the public has more reason to fear the police than the police have a reason to fear for their lives when dealing with the public.
I am not anti-police but anti-bad police and bad police activity.
My dad and uncle were both great NYC Lieutenants and believed in the motto to serve and protect the public. Nowadays the most important phrase coming from our law enforcement community when a citizen is ether killed or severely injured by a police officer, is the phrase, ” I was in fear of my life.” Say those magic words and almost any action by law enforcement becomes acceptable by our judicial system.
Well in most cases the police officer’s involved suffer minor or no injuries while they in turn send the person they contacted to the emergency room or the morgue.
I believe those found guilty by a group of their peers should be punished. But I do not believe law enforcement has the right in a free society to be judge, jury and executioner.
How do we stop this grotesque behavior by law enforcement? First any candidate that accepts directly or indirectly money from a police union should never be elected. The people should elect no retired police officer running for office. There is an inherent conflict of interest when we have retired police officers as our local elected officials.
Only candidates through years of speaking out against these wrongdoings should be given your valuable votes. Also be very careful not to support a candidate who has come to the dance in the bottom of the 9th inning or even later. Kelly Thomas was beaten and killed by 6 Fullerton officers on July 5th, 2011. Those candidates for political office that were silent then but are speaking out now should be looked at with great suspicion.
Wake up America. We need justice and we need it very, very soon. We basically have a respectful and compliant populace. But at some time, the people will no longer be able to tolerate this consistent bad behavior from those in authority.
We threw off the tyranny of England over a tea tax, killing and mayhem caused by those in authority are certainly more serious matters.
With the family clamming up (hopefully only temporarily) we’re stuck for confirming or getting much more details – police report, hospital records, autopsy, store parking lot video, etc. This may just end up being “She said / nobody said.” We’ll be on top of it though…
Pace yourself,Barry. The election is still 4 months away. Don’t blow your self-righteous rage all at once.
I have seen friends die of hep c, they seem fine and then 6 months later they are 6 feet under.
From your video I would say she needed to be in the hospital immediately as she look like someone in liver failure with blood toxin’s interfering with brain activity.
Also there must have been a reason that she wasn’t being treated for those viruses.
Im confused on how it is that this incident was handled by a “Cadet” WTF? Why is a cadet doing the arrest and restraining of a person? Where were the regular cops?
This was my mother and she’s resting in peace now.
The key is not whether this unfortunate encounter by Ms. Hernandez with this GG police cadet may have caused any long term physical harm to this women. As some have pointed out, there are two many unknowns to draw such a conclusion at this time. Paul Lucas makes an excellent point as to why this Cadet was sent to handle this incident on her own.
But the conclusion I draw based on the above facts, and the apparent apology by the GG police chief, is that it appears that yet another Orange County law enforcement person used poor judgement and an apparent excess of force with dealing with Ms. Hernandez.
I keep on hearing from the bad policing apologists that it is hard to deal with people with problems. I say that this is an integral part of any police officers job description and if it is too difficult for them to handle these people properly then they should find another profession.
Who is the cadet? We should have the right to know the name of the person responsible for killing this poor woman.
This is odd. Cadets can’t arrest anybody can they? Are they even “sworn”? Something else is going on here.
Also, that woman looks 80, not 54.
53. I’ll see if Ellen (the daughter) will answer any more questions today or tomorrow. Or if Matt has managed to get the police report.