The official version of how a Roane County detainee wound up dead was this — Dustin Barnwell overdosed on muscle relaxers and stopped breathing as a result.

It would take a civil-rights lawsuit and two years of legal wrangling for a crucial detail missing from that official version to emerge. Barnwell, 26, did not stop breathing on his own. Instead, medics paralyzed his lungs via a drug and then allegedly flubbed the insertion of a breathing tube.

Roane County attorneys did not acknowledge the use of a paralytic drug until September 2014 when they filed identically worded affidavits from the medics. Those filings came nearly a year after the attorney for Barnwell’s survivors discovered on his own that fact, court records show.

Forced to concede those facts, Roane County, two of its lawmen and four of its medics still sought to have the federal lawsuit filed by Barnwell’s survivors tossed out. In their motion, they insisted the decision to paralyze Barnwell was medically necessary to allow them to insert the breathing tube.

It is an argument U.S. District Judge Pamela Reeves late last week rejected as nonsensical. She is allowing the lawsuit to proceed to a jury trial — a hurdle tough to leap in the federal system.

“The defendants argue that they ‘needed to cause paralysis so that they could place a tracheal tube to assist with breathing and heart function,” Reeves wrote. “On its face, this argument makes little sense. The defendants appear to be claiming that they paralyzed Mr. Barnwell’s functioning lungs so they could insert a tube to help his lungs function.”

Rarer still, Reeves also is refusing to grant immunity to Roane County, Deputies Richard Stooksbury and Mitch Grigsby and medics David Randle, Robert Cooker, Mike Carter and Mike Myers. That decision comes after a former Roane County medic filed an affidavit in which she alleges law enforcement routinely urged and emergency workers routinely used induced paralysis to deal with rowdy detainees.

“Any reasonable officer with a general understanding of Fourth Amendment law should be on notice that needlessly paralyzing an individual with a punitive intent, or even with the simple intent to put an end to an annoyance, likely falls outside constitutionally permissible behavior,” Reeves wrote in her opinion.

No one disputes Barnwell, 26, had taken eight muscle relaxers on the night of his death in November 2011 nor that he was cursing and thrashing around when Stooksbury and Grigsby roused him from the couch of his girlfriend’s home on Roane Manor Drive. The girlfriend feared he was suffering an overdose and had called for help. The two deputies struggled with Barnwell to place handcuffs on him. The medics arrived during the struggle.

An investigative report released to the public by Roane County District Attorney General Russell Johnson more than a year after Barnwell’s death stated Barnwell stopped breathing and medics tried to revive him via CPR to no avail. There was no mention of the use of a paralytic drug or breathing tube. Roane County Medical Examiner Dr. William Bennett mentioned no breathing issues in his autopsy report. If he was aware of the use of a paralytic drug, he did not list it in his report nor was Barnwell’s blood tested for the presence of it.

In one section of the report Bennett describes “pad marks” from a defibrillator and “needle puncture sites” near Barnwell’s neck and on his left forearm.

Those reports were all attorney John M. Wolfe Jr. had to rely upon when he first filed the lawsuit. In late 2013, however, a doctor Wolfe hired to review medical reports in the case discovered the use of the paralytic drug and evidence the breathing tube had been inserted in Barnwell’s stomach instead of his lungs. That mistake, the doctor opined, would have meant Barnwell could not breathe at all. Wolfe then revised the lawsuit to include not only that finding but an affidavit from former medic Karen Human. In it, she wrote, “It was common practice for Roane County EMS employees to use drugs to knock out unruly patients.”

This isn’t the first time paralyzing drugs have been used on detainees in East Tennessee. Former Methodist Medical Center of Oak Ridge Dr. Michael LaPaglia used drugs to paralyze two men in two separate cases in 2010 to conduct cavity searches for drugs at the behest of Anderson County law enforcement. One man had no drugs hidden in his body. The other did, but a federal appeals court tossed out his conviction, calling the paralyzation “shocking to the conscience.”

Lapaglia was later caught with drugs in his West Knoxville home. His medical license was suspended for six months as a result.   (Jamie Satterfield – Knox News)