As Casper police officers brought Wayne Sanchez into the Natrona County jail for booking on a methamphetamine charge in March 2023, Sanchez began to shake violently. He told officers he’d eaten a significant amount of drugs.
With Sanchez rapidly deteriorating, the jail nurse told officers she would not accept him and they needed to take the 62-year-old Casper resident to the hospital.
Officers brought Sanchez, moaning and continuing to shake, to Banner Wyoming Medical Center, where he was examined by a nurse and a longtime emergency room doctor. After an examination that police officers later told Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agents appeared very brief — one officer estimated it lasted only 60 seconds — Dr. Ryan Benson came out of a room with Sanchez and gave his diagnosis.
It was a case of “incarceritus,” Benson said, the two officers told agents, according to a DCI report. In other words, Sanchez was faking it to avoid jail. The doctor “cleared” Sanchez, allowing the officers to take him back to the jail.
Within 15 minutes, as the officers’ patrol car pulled into the jail’s sally-port, Sanchez had stopped breathing. Though officers and jail staff performed CPR and other life saving measures for 45 minutes, paramedics ultimately pronounced Sanchez dead at the scene. The coroner ruled the death to be from a methamphetamine overdose. Investigators found a plastic baggie and “suspected methamphetamine residue pieces” in his stomach.
Sanchez’s sister, Gloria Fetzer, is now suing Benson, an attendant nurse, Banner, the Casper Police Department, the individual officers and the city in federal court. In a complaint filed Feb. 24, her attorney argued the hospital had demonstrated “deliberate indifference to pretrial detainees’ health needs.”
When officers first brought Sanchez to the emergency room, Benson asked the officers “if it was a real thing or if Sanchez was faking,” they told DCI, according to the report.
The lawsuit seeks to hold the officers and department at fault for not returning Sanchez to the hospital as his condition visibly worsened, his seizures intensified and he did not respond to their questions.
The Casper Police Department requested the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, which often investigates in-custody deaths in county jails, to lead an inquiry into Sanchez’s case. Natrona County District Attorney Dan Itzen declined to bring criminal charges against the officers involved, finding no evidence of any law breaking.
The Wyoming Attorney General represents law enforcement officers in civil lawsuits.
An attorney for Benson, Andy Sears, declined to comment on the case or make his client available for an interview, saying it was too early.
Benson repeatedly told DCI investigators he would not speak to them until he could arrange to do so with his attorney present. That interview did not happen until April 25, more than six weeks after Sanchez’s March 8 death. It was unrecorded, the DCI report states. Benson told agents that though Sanchez was shaking, he thought the movements were “not involuntary” and he did not believe the arrestee was overdosing. Sanchez’s heart rate was not elevated the way he would have expected it to be on stimulants, Benson said, according to the report.
Benson told agents he thought Sanchez might be trying to avoid jail. “Dr. Benson stated it is common for patients to claim medical issues until the officers leave the hospital,” the report read.
DCI later interviewed the nurse who attended to Sanchez with Benson. Her account supported his, according to the investigative report.
Jack Edwards, an attorney for Fetzer, declined to make his client available for an interview but said they were prepared to take the case to trial. “We really think that a Wyoming jury needs to hear what’s going on here and make a determination of whether this man was treated right,” Edwards said.
A spokesperson for Banner told WyoFile the company doesn’t comment on specific patient cases.
Arrested for paraphernalia
Casper police officers arrested Sanchez the morning of his death, after a car wreck on the north end of Casper just off I-25. Sanchez had been in the passenger’s seat of one of the two vehicles involved in the crash, in which no one was injured. The person who reported the wreck told police that Sanchez left the area with a backpack.
Sanchez returned to the scene in his Dodge pickup, and told officers he had only left to collect his own vehicle. Officers questioned Sanchez, who one police officer described to DCI agents as looking like a heavy drug user with a “sunken in” face, and asked to search his backpack. Sanchez suggested they search it together, pulled clothing out of the bag and then told officers there was nothing in there, according to the officers.
Ultimately, an officer found a syringe in the bag. According to the officer, Sanchez told them it was an old syringe but might have methamphetamine on it. From there officers searched Sanchez’s truck, where they found a glass pipe they also believed was for using meth, as well as another syringe. Officers performed a field test that showed meth on both the pipe and the two syringes and arrested Sanchez.
Two officers, Matthew Lougee and Zach Gonzales, who was at the time a trainee under the guidance of Lougee, took Sanchez to jail. It’s not clear at what point he would have swallowed the bag of methamphetamine. In his interview with DCI, Gonzales said Sanchez was compliant, conversational and “appeared fine” until they got him to the jail booking area, where his behavior began to change rapidly.
Sanchez told officers he had eaten “an eight ball,” a term which typically describes 3.5 grams of drugs. Though most often used in reference to cocaine, it could also be applied to meth. Sanchez did not clarify what drug he had consumed, though it’s unclear if officers asked him.
Finding Sanchez shaking and agitated, the jail nurse told the two Casper police officers she would not admit him, and that he needed to go to the hospital. Along the way, Sanchez stopped communicating with officers, who had to help him to and from the car.
During the drive to the hospital, Lougee, the trainee, asked Gonzales to “walk [him] through” what was going on, according to DCI’s review of their body-worn camera footage.
“We’re gonna go get cleared at the hospital,” Lougee said, “then we’ll bring him back here.” Sanchez, the training officer said, “just wasted a large portion of our day.”
The officers arrived at the hospital around 9:10 a.m. and escorted in Sanchez, who DCI agents viewing the footage saw as “shaking uncontrollably” and “making numerous incoherent noises that may be attempts at words.”
On their way in, a hospital employee asked them, “is this just a clearing?” Lougee responded, “yes, for jail.”
According to Fetzer’s lawsuit, Sanchez left the hospital at 9:30 a.m., just 20 minutes later, and was likely dead by 9:38 a.m., dying in the back of the patrol car after being cleared for jail. Officially, he was pronounced dead at 10:19 a.m., according to the autopsy report included in DCI’s investigation.
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