When Carl Grant awoke from emergency surgery and couldn’t move, he apologized to family gathered around his hospital bed.
In the fog of dementia, the U.S. Marine Corps veteran thought he’d been paralyzed in the Vietnam War. The truth: It was February 2020, he was 68, and a police officer had wrecked the spinal cord in his neck by slamming him onto an emergency room floor.
Grant’s family decided not to correct him. He was already confused enough.
“We left it like that, we didn’t know how he’d react,” his sister, Kathy Jenkins, recalled.
This photo from the Birmingham Police Department shows Carl Grant in a bed with wounds on his head at the UAB Hospital in Birmingham, Ala., after police were called when he was at the porch of a stranger’s home on Feb. 2, 2020. Grant died nearly six months later. The death certificate worksheet lists his paralysis as the cause, attributing it to “physical assault with body slam.” (Birmingham Police Department via AP)
The story of how Grant ended up paralyzed began that Super Bowl Sunday, when Grant drove off from his Georgia home to shop for groceries.
It was to be a quick trip, so he left his cellphone at home and the heater on. Along the way, Grant became disoriented and turned his Kia Optima onto I-20, driving west into the fading light.
More than two hours later, he was in Birmingham, Alabama, using his keys in the dark to try to unlock the door to a stranger’s house. It was a one-story brick home, just like his.
The owner called 911. Grant assured responding officers that this was his home. They handcuffed Grant, but realized he wasn’t a burglar — he truly thought he lived there. One officer recognized signs of dementia. Back at the precinct, a sergeant would tell officers they should have called medics for an evaluation and notified a supervisor. Instead, police told Grant to move along.
He…
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