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Questions linger in jail death

A Zephyrhills man died after deputies pinned him down. Two years later, the Pinellas Sheriff's Office is set to release its review to relatives who are suing.

By JACOB H. FRIES
Published April 10, 2005

	[Family photo]
	Larry Germonprez was father to six, including Danielle, with him above. "This was a worthwhile person," said Jennifer Pugh, Danielle's mother.

CLEARWATER - Larry Germonprez pleaded for his life.

Detention deputies were taking him down a hallway in the Pinellas County Jail's medical wing. He had critically high blood pressure and the raw nerves of alcohol withdrawal.

He resisted each step of the way. As the deputies pulled him toward a cell, the 41-year-old cried:

"If you put me in there, I'll die!"

Three deputies forced the struggling Zephyrhills man into the cell and pinned him face down on a padded cot until he stopped resisting. Minutes later, Germonprez - a college graduate and father of six - died, his ribs broken in 17 places, the air crushed out of him.

That was two years ago, but questions about his death remain unanswered. A St. Petersburg Times review of hundreds of pages of witness statements and a dozen interviews has found:

A video of the incident shows Germonprez had stopped breathing for more than three minutes before anyone called for help.

When an investigator for the state attorney inquired about the death, he was told Germonprez had died from injuries sustained in a car accident.

No outside agency ever interviewed the three deputies who pinned down Germonprez.

The Sheriff's Office has taken an unprecedented 23 months to review the actions of its deputies. This week, the findings of that internal investigation are expected to be released.

Germonprez's family is tired of waiting.

"It was brutal, and it was wrong," said Jennifer Pugh, 38, who used to be married to Germonprez and is the mother of two of his children.

Germonprez wasn't perfect. He battled alcohol addiction. He smoked marijuana. But he made sure his children knew they were loved, and when he divorced their mother, the two of them drove to court together.

"This was a worthwhile person," Pugh said.

Germonprez was booked into the jail on the night of March 7, 2003. He had rear-ended a car on Roosevelt Boulevard and fled on foot. A deputy arrested him moments later at a gas station on charges of drunken driving, leaving the scene of an accident, marijuana possession and driving with a suspended license.

Germonprez gave deputies no problems for the first three days in jail. Then fellow inmates reported that he seemed delirious and was walking around naked. He was taken to the jail's medical wing for observation at 1:42 a.m. March 11.

According to interviews and court records, this is how that final morning unfolded:

Shortly before 6 a.m., Germonprez began to kick and pound the steel door of his 10- by 7-foot cell, saying he wanted to talk with someone. A nurse decided he might fare better in a cell with bars, rather than a steel door, to ease his claustrophobia. It also would allow medical personnel to watch him over a video monitor.

When his cell door was unlocked, the 5-foot-8, 188-pound Germonprez rushed out. Deputies Walter Kelly and Paul Papasergi grabbed an arm and forced him to the floor. They cuffed his hands in front.

At the time, Germonprez had "critically high" blood pressure, nurses recorded, and symptoms of alcohol withdrawal - both of which can cause anxiety.

Interviewed later, Maj. Kirk Brunner, the jail's commander, couldn't say whether Germonprez's condition warranted a trip to an outside hospital. "If somebody needs to go to the hospital, we don't cut corners," he said. "They go to the hospital."

Once inside the new cell, Kelly and Deputy William Johnson put Germonprez face down on the cot, his head to the wall, his handcuffed wrists above his head.

Johnson held his head and shoulders, Kelly pushed down on his lower back, and Papasergi grabbed onto his legs, according to accounts they later gave to a homicide detective. (The deputies declined to comment for this article.)

Germonprez kept resisting.

According to jail policy, the deputies could have left the cell, leaving Germonprez handcuffed until he calmed down. "It's a judgment call," Brunner said.

Instead, the deputies struggled with Germonprez.

"He would never lay still and comply," Kelly told detectives, "so we kept on just holding him there."

Papasergi said he had to put all of his weight, 190 pounds, onto Germonprez. The other two deputies weighed a combined 440 pounds.

At 6:03 a.m., a supervisor said they should put Germonprez in a restraint chair to subdue him. The deputies waited for the chair to arrive.

"The guy's still bucking. He's still bucking," Papasergi warned Cpl. Adrian Nenu, who folded Germonprez's legs and put them in shackles.

Germonprez stopped kicking. The fight was over.

Someone unhooked Germonprez's handcuffs and refastened them behind his back. A nurse checked their fit and found blood on his arms, but didn't notice anything else wrong with him.

With a handheld camera, a deputy began to videotape the cell, which is standard procedure when deputies call for a restraint chair.

The tape hasn't been made public, but Assistant State Attorney Bob Lewis said it begins with Germonprez lying motionless on the cot, his chest still.

"It looks like (deputies) are getting their breath. ... Nobody is paying attention to him," he said.

By Lewis' count, three minutes and 15 seconds passed before anyone realized Germonprez wasn't breathing. When they did, he was blue.

Paramedic Greg Holding had watched the struggle on a closed-circuit monitor that wasn't taped. The next day, he told a nurse: "It seemed like an extended period of time they were on top of him."

Holding declined to comment for this article.

Germonprez was taken to Humana Northside Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:10 a.m. His hands and legs were still shackled.

Sheriff's homicide Detectives Robert Snipes and Judy Vovan arrived at the jail later that morning.

Snipes talked with the three deputies who had restrained Germonprez. Transcripts of those conversations run 24 pages long. Snipes declined to comment on the case.

Snipes also visited the cell. Photographs were taken showing smeared blood on the plastic mattress and on the walls above the cot. Then Snipes contacted Germonprez's family.

But no one called the State Attorney's Office to report the death. When an investigator for the office read about it in a newspaper, he call the Sheriff's Office and was told that Germonprez died from injuries related to a car accident, Lewis said.

That investigator, Tom Diebold, told the Times he doesn't recall who told him that.

Detectives didn't immediately inform the state attorney because they were told Germonprez had a medical condition and only had a cut on his scalp, said spokesman Mac McMullen.

The Sheriff's Office policy on a reporting a death is vague. Detectives are to notify prosecutors "at an appropriate time or as soon as sufficient information about the investigation is available."

The autopsy, completed April 15, 2003, found Germonprez had sustained 17 rib fractures and determined the cause of death was blunt chest trauma. The manner of death: homicide, meaning he was killed by someone else.

"At some point, his chest was crushed," Chief Medical Examiner Jon R. Thogmartin said.

"It doesn't take a lot" to cause those injuries, he said, but "face down, with that many rib fractures, that will cause you a problem."

The cuts on Germonprez's scalp were caused when he flailed and struck his head with the handcuffs, Thogmartin said.

Since 2002, 17 people have died in the custody of Pinellas law enforcement officers. Most were suicides or accidental deaths. Besides Germonprez, only one man was killed while being restrained.

Thogmartin said some forensic doctors would rule Germonprez's death an accident - rather than a homicide - just as some call it suicide when police kill a man who wants to be shot.

Still, he said, "I'm confident in the results."

In a letter to the sheriff, State Attorney Bernie McCabe concluded in May 2003 that Germonprez's death was "an excusable homicide," calling it "accidental and unintentional."

But Lewis, who investigated the case, never spoke with the deputies who restrained Germonprez. Nor did Lewis interview their supervisors or the nurses who worked that morning.

Lewis, a former police officer and a 24-year veteran of the State Attorney's Office, spoke with the medical examiner, the detectives and Holding, the paramedic. Otherwise, he depended on transcripts Snipes and Vovan provided.

Typically, Lewis said, he would be called to the scene and speak with witnesses, he said. Because no one reported the death, he didn't have that opportunity.

Lewis is confident no crime occurred. The deputies, he said, would have had to show a "reckless disregard for human life" and know that their actions would result in death to be charged with negligent homicide. "Nobody realized the guy was hurt," Lewis said.

A Florida Department of Law Enforcement review requested by the governor concurred, but again without talking to the main players.

With the criminal probe finished, sheriff's detectives began an internal investigation in May 2003.

When Sheriff Everett Rice was elected to the state House of Representatives, his chief deputy, Jim Coats, replaced him.

Coats said the slow pace of the internal investigation was due largely to detectives waiting for a second opinion Rice had requested on Germonprez's autopsy.

In April 2004, detectives sent the autopsy paperwork to forensic experts with the Army. Eight months later, the Army returned it, unable to review the documents because the Army was too busy performing autopsies on soldiers killed in Iraq.

Then the autopsy was sent to the medical examiner in Polk County. The results of that review, completed in February, have not been released.

On Thursday, the case is scheduled to go before the sheriff's administrative review board, then to Coats himself.

Jennifer Pugh, Germonprez's former wife, her two children and Germonprez's four children by other women filed a $10-million wrongful death lawsuit last month.

"We're not sue-happy people by any means, but this is wrong," Pugh said. "They killed him."

Amid her many questions about the death, there is a very human one: Why didn't Germonprez just ask someone to bail him out?

When he was booked into the jail, Germonprez had $136.80 in his pocket. For $3.20 more, he could have obtained a bond, and his freedom.

"I think he was at the point where he thought, "I got myself into this mess, I'll get myself out,"' Pugh said.

[Last modified April 10, 2005, 00:39:14]