July 31, 2025 • 27 mins
Reggie Payne was rushed by ambulance to Sutter Medical Center, four miles north from the family’s home in Sacramento. This was February 25, 2020. He arrived at the hospital at 8:22 p.m., and was wheeled into the emergency room—clinging to life.
At around 10 p.m., Reggie could no longer breathe on his own. He was intubated.
Reggie’s family raced to the hospital and arrived to find him in an emergency room cubicle — comatose and on life support. They were stunned. Harriet’s hope faded as she prayed at Reggie’s side in the ER. It didn’t look good.
Meanwhile, the City of Sacramento and the police department were looking for someone to blame.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
On the evening of October eighth, two thousand and three,
I was standing inside the kitchen of my home in Newerchelle,
New York. My wife, Katherine and I were talking as
I held our four month old daughter, Casey in my arms,
and then, without warning, Casey flopped backwards. I felt her
little body shift, and when I looked at her face,
it was turning blue. Her mouth was clenched closed, her
(00:23):
eyes were staring right at me, wide as quarters. I
yelled to Catherine, she's turning blue, she's turning blue. Catherine
took her from my arms and placed her flat on
the floor. I grabbed my phone and I called nine
one one. My daughter's turning blue. I screamed, I don't
think she's able to breathe. The dispatcher asked me to
(00:43):
calm down throughout some questions, then told me emergency workers
were already en route. With Catherine leaning over our baby.
I walked to the front door and just stood there, screaming,
where are they? Where are they? Within minutes, I heard
the sirens. By the time the paramedics entered, Casey was
slowly emerging from her state. It turns out she was
(01:06):
suffering from a febrow seizar, a terrifying yet relatively harmless
infliction that happens when a young person's temperature rises too quickly.
I honestly thought my daughter was dying before my eyes.
It was the scariest thing I've ever faced.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I had something similarly terrifying happened to me. During spring
break of twenty twenty three. I headed to Florida with
my two daughters and some family friends. My youngest daughter, Isla,
chose to ride with her friend in their car, and
I drove ahead with my older daughter. I was driving
ahead of them on Interstate ten when suddenly I heard
(01:46):
a loud crash. I looked through the rear view mirror
just in time to see the friend's car tumbling end
over end and coming to a halt on the side
of the highway, upside down, with my ten year old
daughter in the vehicle. Turns out they were rear ended
by another car traveling around seventy miles an hour. I
had to wait and excruciating ten minutes until emergency crews arrived. Luckily,
(02:11):
everyone walked away from that vehicle with only minor injuries,
but it was terrifying seeing it all unfold The worst part,
of course, was talking to Isla through the window of
the upside down car, urging her to stay calm, that
everything was going to be okay, and feeling utterly helpless
(02:31):
until help arrived.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Once you become a parent, you eternally live in terror
of losing a child. When you're younger and you're more carefree,
maybe your biggest fear is embarrassing yourself, or being fired
from a job, or maybe getting dumped by a significant other.
But once you're a mother or father, it shifts. You
are no longer the number one priority.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Your kid's safety is, and the loss of a child,
no matter the age, no matter the circumstance, is the
most crushing thing imaginable. Your primary task in life is protecting.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Them, But sometimes you can't. You just can't. This is
Finding Sexy Sweat, a podcast where me, Jeff Pearlman, and
my colleague Rick Jervis attempt to retrace the life of
our longtime friend and fellow journalist Reggie.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Paine, better known by his rap name Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
We're trying to learn how our life paths differed so sharply,
how the demons of mental illness crept into his life
and why he met set an abrupt death after being
handcuffed on the floor of his parents' home in Sacramento.
This is episode seven The Big Red Handle.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
At the end of episode six, Reggie was being rushed
by ambulance to Sutter Medical Center, four miles north from
the family's home in Sacramento. He was originally destined for
Kaiser Permanent and to a South Sacramento Medical Center, which
was slightly closer, but because of a new virus something
called COVID, had overtaken the facility, he was brought instead
(04:10):
to Sutter. This was February twenty fifth, twenty twenty. He
arrived at the hospital at eight twenty two pm and
was wheeled into the emergency room. Clinging to life.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I know, clinging to life is something we say and
something Sacramento officials certainly said in the aftermath. Or was
there actually life to cling to like? Did Reggie have
a chance of surviving?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
He did show some signs of life, but his condition
was crashing fast. Paramedics were literally performing CPR on him
when they wheeled them into the hospital. Once inside, Reggie
didn't have a pulse for twelve minutes, then suddenly regained
a pulse.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
But then five minutes later he lost it again. That's
how it went that night. They pumped him with meds
to get his heart going. It would be down its
own a few moments, and then it would stop again.
At around ten pm, Reggie couldn't no longer breathe on
his own. He was intubated. Reggie's family raced to the
hospital and arrived to find him in an emergency room cubicle,
(05:14):
comatose and a life support. They were stunned. Earlier that evening,
Reggie seemed okay. Remember Harriet didn't die on nine one
one because she thought her son's life was in danger.
She just needed help with his blood sugar. Rufus feared
the worst, however, when he saw Reggie being wheeled out
of the home after losing consciousness.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Put on Gary kicking out, not till he was dead, No, no, nothing,
it was just I'm faking with.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Harriet's hope faded as she prayed at Reggie's side in
the er. It did not look good.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
We go in there and Reggie's just he's gone. He's gone.
He's breathing because they intubated him, is being breathing for him.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Then they finally tell well, we were keeping hope for
those couple of days, and then they told me he
had multiple heart attacks and multiple struggles.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
They kept this thing on him.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
They we're looking for some brain waves, and no, he
was brain dead.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You know, I think it's important to focus on something here.
You're Reggie's family, you're inside a hospital, and an hour earlier,
there was no reason to think Reggie wouldn't be okay.
This was a diabetic episode. It could have happened to anyone.
So imagine being Harriet who called nine to one one.
She's standing there, standing above her son, this boy she
(06:45):
raised into a man, this charismatic college student, this aspiring journalist,
and now he has a breathing tube down his throat.
Ivs are in his arm, there's beeping, He's not responsive.
Harriet's doesn't see her or hear her. They moved Reggie
out of the ICU. Rick asked Harriet about the long
(07:07):
days that.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Followed, and in that time, was there any hope that
he was going to pull out of it and become.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
Better or well? I think we hoped till the day
before I hoped. I don't know if you guys hoped
to saw some kind of movement one time. Yeah, it
was like the first couple of days.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
Thought some time or the blood fresher went up and
was like, oh, did we excite him too much or something.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
You know.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Reggie was placed in a private room with a single bed,
your basic hospital room. Over the next six days, loved
ones came to pray and stand and wait and hope.
Reggie was raised in the church and his is a
devout believer that Jesus Christ can heal the sick. Miracles happen.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Anyone who has stood vigil in a hospital for someone
critically ill knows how time there stands dreadfully still. It's
a lot of staring at a TV, usually tuned to
the price is right or the local weather, staring at
a monitor at a loved one lying motionless. It's also
a lot of waiting for something anything, a sign, a
(08:31):
finger twitch, a cough. My father died of pincret of
cancer in December of twenty twenty three, and those days
and nights were interminable trips to the cafeteria for a
pudding cup or blessed moments of escapism. It just goes
on and on and on and on. You're locked in
(08:52):
a cell of misery and despair.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
That was Reggie's loved ones. Over that week, they would
enter the room, stay over his bed and pray, pray
as hard as they could, Please save our son, Please
save our brother. And even though they didn't fully grasp
it at the time, something was unfolding that didn't feel
quite right. Inside the hospital, Reggie was hooked to a
(09:16):
breathing machine, but at their home, Harriet and Rufus's phone
was constantly ringing, and those calls were from a homicide detective.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
When her son, Reggie was unconscious at Suttern Medical Center,
Harriet devoted nearly every waking hour to staying by his side.
She would turn on a basketball game or another sporting
event and sit and watch with the sound of the
respirator keeping time. As a longtime nurse, she wanted to
advocate for his care. As a mother facing on speakable trauma,
(09:49):
she just needed to be near her son.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
Like Rich, squeeze my hand if you hear me, no, squeeze,
I know he would squeeze my hand if it's anyway
yet anything in him.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
He would have gave me something, but he couldn't.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Tia Nicholas, Reggie's former girlfriend and mother to his son
also showed up at the hospital the first night and
stayed overnight with the family. For her, seeing Reggie, once
so full of life, laying there, quiet and unresponsive was surreal.
Speaker 7 (10:22):
Almost like it's not real, what's going on? You know,
like WHOA, this is him? I think he made a
slight movement when I said, hey, is Tia, because you know,
through all this time, he's still I think he still
wouldn't have mind had we got back together, although we
hadn't been together for years. And I know he seemed
like he moved his eye.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
But maybe he didn't.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
Maybe it's just what I wanted to see.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
As Harriet came home exhausted each evening, her phone would
inevitably ring. Sometimes it was friends calling a check on her,
and then she started getting calls from a homicide detective
from the Sacramento Police Department. Instead of inquiring about Reggie's
condition or explaining the department's own internal investigation, Reggie's sister says,
(11:05):
the detective would ask about Reggie's background, what he did,
his family lineage.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
I'm how homicide, the expectives calling you again?
Speaker 4 (11:14):
And she and he would She would.
Speaker 6 (11:16):
Keep calling and He's like, oh what isn't how we
usually investigating? And I was like crying, But they kill
people and a homicide investigative are not calling a family
member talking about oh well, who is his biological dad?
Speaker 4 (11:27):
What does his son do?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
With her son still on life support, Harriet didn't give
the calls much thought. She answered questions politely. Reggie's sisters, however,
were much more skeptical.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
They're trying to.
Speaker 6 (11:41):
See who if they did this to, and trying to
build a case on his characters before he was even
off the machine.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Oh well, who is his bilological dad? Oh well, what
is his son do?
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Like?
Speaker 5 (11:51):
Who call it?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Right?
Speaker 4 (11:53):
And I just I do not coalk to them.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
So you're this family and you're going through this incredible
tragedy and it's happening in real time before you, and
people call you from the city and you maybe would
logically presume that they're calling to check in and make
sure your son is okay, and instead you feel like
you're being interrogated and investigated and targeted. And that has
(12:16):
to be just a jarring, jarring thing to experience.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
It's really hard to understand what the police department's trying
to do here. Like, On the one hand, they obviously
have an investigation which they're trying to get into, but
there hasn't been a death yet, and so it's not
a death and custody case, so it's unclear what they're
trying to investigate at this point.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Save for those calls, no one from the city of
Sacramento called to check in on Reggie's condition or offer apologies.
According to the family, none of the rescue workers pop
their heads into his hospital room. Life is in the
empt is a NonStop carousel of trauma, so maybe that's normal,
but behind the scenes, Sacramento officials had to be worried.
(13:00):
They must have read the early internal reports of what
went down of a call for help from a concerned
mother morphing into a black man a life support.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Harriet continued to speak to a homicide detective on the phone,
and a few detectives even visited the hospital. Harriet told
us it felt as if they were checking to see
if he was dead or alive. No emotion, no genuine empathy.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Meanwhile, Reggie was showing few signs of anything. Day after
day passed without a positive signal from Reggie. Neurologists told
the family it didn't look good. Reggie wasn't showing much
of any brain activity. Finally, after six days on life support,
the time came to make a decision.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
They were looking for some brain waves and no, he
was brain dead.
Speaker 8 (13:51):
Then March second, the donor people came to talk to
me in Little Bow It this decided to do it
on the third to take the life support, and we
(14:13):
decided to just let it go.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
On the afternoon of March third, twenty twenty, the staff
at Sutter Medical Center played One Wish by Ray j
one of Reggie's favorite songs, on the floor where Reggie
lay in an operating room where he would be removed
from life support.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
The song blared through the hallway as nurses lined the walls.
Harry and Rufus walked through the procession, tears rimming their eyes,
followed by other family members. Harry entered the room and
sat next to Reggie. Then, as Reggie was disconnected from
the breathing apparatus, she held his head in her arms.
(15:00):
She felt a jolt of energy surged through her.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
I felt his first heartbeat. I heard it, and it
seemed like his heart was just dumping so strong, like
I could just feel it.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
You know.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
It was like boom boom. I'm holding him and I
can just feel his heart like I could just feel it.
I could feel it like inside of me. It was
so strong. I could just feel it, like it was
doing like this to me.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Life dreamed from her firstborn son. As Harriet cradled Reggie's
head and whispered to him.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
I was telling him, don't be scared. Granny and Granpy
is waiting there for you. That's my mother and father
waiting there to take your hands, Bitchie. Don't be scared.
Just relax.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
At five twenty seven pm, Reggie demon Pain died in
his mother's arms at Sutter Medical Center. Forty eight years earlier,
Harriet had felt his first heartbeat, now she had witnessed
his last.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
The coronavirus pandemic was just starting to ramp up across
the United States. Its victims were being isolated in hospitals
and funeral homes, and precautionary measures could delay funerals by weeks,
so the family opted to cremate Reggie's body and have
a quick service for him.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
No autopsy was performed, lacking any specifics on the circumstances
of his death. The doctor who filled out. Reggie's death
certificate listed quote acute respiratory failure with viral pneumonia and
influenza as the cause of death, adding end stage renal
disease with hemodialysis. Anyone reading that would think Reggie simply
(16:59):
cut the flew and his kidneys came out.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Four months later, however, an investigator with the Sacramento County
Coroner's Office reviewed medical records, body camp footage, and other
facts to make an official determination of Reggie's death. She
concluded that quote restraint could not be excluded as contributing
to his death. The cause of death was revised to
(17:23):
sudden cardiac arrest while being restrained in prone position.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Reggie hadn't died from the flu. He died in part
because police had handcuffed him, face down on the floor
with his hands behind his back. A few days after
Reggie was taken off life support, Captain Jeffrey Kleine learned
from his superiors that Reggie had died. If you recall,
Klein was the highest ranking fire official on the scene
(17:52):
that night. He's the one who decided to get police involved.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Klein didn't respond to our request to interview him. He
can't know what he felt at that moment, but a
man he and his colleagues had attended to on a
routine medical call was now dead.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
In fact, ever since the night of the incident, things
didn't appear right. Klein and others testified in depositions, and
he said police were outside the hospital asking the firefighters
for statements while Reggie was still in triage, which he
found very peculiar and beyond the norm. He sensed that
the Sacramento Police Department was maneuvering to pin the blame
(18:30):
on fire.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Klein tried to get its superiors to be proactive, to
launch their own investigators on the case to support him
and the other firefighters there that night. He caught a
deputy fire chief at home that night, waking him up
to inform him of the night's events. He began writing
up emails and sending them to bosses and crafting a
timeline of events. The response, according to Client's testimony, next
(18:57):
to nothing.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
In fire department parlance, Client's push to involve his superiors
is called pulling the big red handle. In his ten
years as a captain, Client told attorneys he never had
felt the need to pull the big red handle, but
here he was, for the first time in his career,
feeling the case would be big and important enough to
(19:19):
get everyone involved, and yet it felt as if his
bosses were dragging their feet.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Klin met with his superiors a few weeks after the
incident for what was called an end in twelve meeting,
name for the truck that ferried them to the scene.
In that meeting, he caught out his bosses for their
lack of support. Here he is describing that meeting in
a deposition months later.
Speaker 9 (19:42):
I think the way I put it in the Engine
twelve discussion, which eventually became a very adversarial media My
question was to our senior staff, why is it For
the first time in ten or twelve years as a captain,
I pulled the big red handle and asked for your health,
but received nothing.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
In the deposition, Klein made it clear he felt as
if he and the other firefighters were on the hot seat,
even though it was the police who had actually placed
Reggie in the pro position and they were not receiving
equal scrutiny. His fears heightened when he heard that city
officials assigned their own investigator, John Parker, to look into
the event rather than wait for fire administrators to conduct
(20:24):
an internal query.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
In his deposition, Kleine said he found the focus on
firefighters to be unfair. Here he is answering questions from
an attorney representing Reggie's family.
Speaker 8 (20:36):
In your mind, did you feel like the police officers
did anything to contribute to mister Paine's debt?
Speaker 9 (20:42):
I did, and I do.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Okay, can you explain that.
Speaker 9 (20:45):
While mister Payne had extensive underlying medical issues, I believed
that the position and level of restraint that was applied
to mister Payne, coupled with his underlying medical conditions, contributed
heavily towards the long term out come.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
To the call, long term outcome meaning is death.
Speaker 9 (21:03):
Yes, mister Payin my understanding is mister Payne expired eight
days after the data to medically.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Remember, this was a few years after the police shooting
death of Joseph Mann and just two years after the
shooting death of Stefan Clark, which sparked widespread protests across Sacramento.
The last thing the police department needed was the death
of a black man in police presence to turn into
a viral story.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Of course, the firefighters weren't completely without fault. EMTs are
expected to follow protocols set under the Sacramento County Emergency
Medical Services Agency, which states specifically that first responders should
quote avoid prone or hobble restraints due to potential for
respiratory arrest and death from asphyxia or aspiration. Even some
(21:54):
top fire department officials have said that Klein and the
medical professionals on scene it would have been more attuned
to Reggi's condition. They should have ordered police to move
him out of that position if they saw him struggling.
But the question remained, do you tell the police how
to restrain if they're the ones with their restraining training.
(22:15):
It was their handcuffs and their tactics after all.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Then on May twenty fifth, another event took place seventeen
hundred miles away. They'd shake up the entire investigation.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I can't breath.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I Sacramento is no different. Already primed by recent protests
over the deaths of Joseph Mann and Stefan Clark at
the hands of police, protesters took to the street.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
On May twenty ninth, just a few days after Floyd's death.
Hundreds of protesters, led by Black Lives Matter activists, poured
into Franklin Boulevard in South Sacramento, chanting say his name
and hands up on block traffic on nearby Highway. Ninety
nine others clashed with police. Two days later, more protests
(23:07):
took place downtown, and several stores were looted and vandalized.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
On June first, Daryl Steinberg, at the time, Sacramento's mayor,
issued a citywide curfew from eight pm to five am.
A few days later, more than one thousand protesters staged
a die in sprawling on a residential street near the
mayor's house. The streets of Sacramento were blazed with protest.
(23:33):
Unlike earlier protests, which were mostly organized and strategic, outsiders
streamed into Sacramento following George Floyd's death, ramping up the temperature.
Protesters were frustrated because they still hadn't seen arrests or
convictions of police officers involved in earlier shootings.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Here's Barry Axius, the longtime Sacramento activist.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
So when twenty twenty come right, the shitty had it's
a fan So here it is. Everyone's in their house.
People are scaredy shit about this covidere where we're cooped
up We're still angry that we didn't get justice for
Stephone Clark. Everything has been exposed, so it's not like
us pertending the shit is not corrupt. We all know
(24:18):
it to be what it is, and still they did
nothing about it.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Everything exploded, and as Sacramento streets exploded with pent up
anger and frustration, city leaders grappled with how to proceed
with another black man who had died in their police
department's custody.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Protests continued in the city from mid May into June
twenty twenty. That month, Captain Kline and the four other
firefighters were placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into
Reggie's death. Meanwhile, the three police officers, David Mauer, John
Helmick and Kevin Mormon, returned to work unscathed.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
We needed to find out why the city went after
the fire fighters in this case and not the police officers.
We can make some assumptions the timing of George Floyd protests,
the temperature on the streets, clined any other firefighters placed
on administrative leave soon after Floyd's death, But our attempts
to gain insight into how all of these were connected
(25:17):
ran into one roadblock after.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Another, a City of Sacramento spokeswoman made it clear that
no one from the city was going to talk to us.
Besides reaching out for comment, we also filed a series
of Freedom of Information Act requests for documents, emails, anything
that could offer glimpses into their investigation. The city replied
with mostly superficial documents, incident reports, and other things previously
(25:42):
released to the public. Nothing that got into the nitty gritty,
nothing that allowed us to peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
We needed a high ranking official with insight into the
behind the scenes machinations who could help us better understand
the city's strategy to go after firefighters full throttle. The
police officers involved. We made more cause, filed more Foyer requests.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
For months, we thought no one would talk to us.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Then someone did. Her name is Gary Zieri or wylast
name is Loch s.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
E h And I was the fire chief of Sacramento,
California's fire department at the time of the incident. On
the next and final episode of Finding Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I guess that he didn't want another George Floyd type
of spotlight on him, and this was to get rid
of the members right away and I'm like, you can't
do that. At one point, one of us just had
a gun in our mouths.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
One of us lost a marriage and a family over this.
Speaker 9 (26:44):
This ran us all through the absolute ringer.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Somebody got to pay for this. Somebody didn't do something right.
I need some answers.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Finding Sexy Sweat is a production and a School of
Humans and iHeart podcasts. This episode was reported, written and
hosted by Jeff Pearlman and Rick Jervis. It was produced
by Gabby Watts with production support from Etily's Perez Zaron
Burnett Is. Our story editor Jesse Niswanger scored and mixed
the episode. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and
(27:20):
Brandon Barr. Please leave the show a review and you
can follow along with the show on Instagram at School
of Humans.
On the evening of October eighth, two thousand and three,
I was standing inside the kitchen of my home in Newerchelle,
New York. My wife, Katherine and I were talking as
I held our four month old daughter, Casey in my arms,
and then, without warning, Casey flopped backwards. I felt her
little body shift, and when I looked at her face,
it was turning blue. Her mouth was clenched closed, her
(00:23):
eyes were staring right at me, wide as quarters. I
yelled to Catherine, she's turning blue, she's turning blue. Catherine
took her from my arms and placed her flat on
the floor. I grabbed my phone and I called nine
one one. My daughter's turning blue. I screamed, I don't
think she's able to breathe. The dispatcher asked me to
(00:43):
calm down throughout some questions, then told me emergency workers
were already en route. With Catherine leaning over our baby.
I walked to the front door and just stood there, screaming,
where are they? Where are they? Within minutes, I heard
the sirens. By the time the paramedics entered, Casey was
slowly emerging from her state. It turns out she was
(01:06):
suffering from a febrow seizar, a terrifying yet relatively harmless
infliction that happens when a young person's temperature rises too quickly.
I honestly thought my daughter was dying before my eyes.
It was the scariest thing I've ever faced.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I had something similarly terrifying happened to me. During spring
break of twenty twenty three. I headed to Florida with
my two daughters and some family friends. My youngest daughter, Isla,
chose to ride with her friend in their car, and
I drove ahead with my older daughter. I was driving
ahead of them on Interstate ten when suddenly I heard
(01:46):
a loud crash. I looked through the rear view mirror
just in time to see the friend's car tumbling end
over end and coming to a halt on the side
of the highway, upside down, with my ten year old
daughter in the vehicle. Turns out they were rear ended
by another car traveling around seventy miles an hour. I
had to wait and excruciating ten minutes until emergency crews arrived. Luckily,
(02:11):
everyone walked away from that vehicle with only minor injuries,
but it was terrifying seeing it all unfold The worst part,
of course, was talking to Isla through the window of
the upside down car, urging her to stay calm, that
everything was going to be okay, and feeling utterly helpless
(02:31):
until help arrived.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Once you become a parent, you eternally live in terror
of losing a child. When you're younger and you're more carefree,
maybe your biggest fear is embarrassing yourself, or being fired
from a job, or maybe getting dumped by a significant other.
But once you're a mother or father, it shifts. You
are no longer the number one priority.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Your kid's safety is, and the loss of a child,
no matter the age, no matter the circumstance, is the
most crushing thing imaginable. Your primary task in life is protecting.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Them, But sometimes you can't. You just can't. This is
Finding Sexy Sweat, a podcast where me, Jeff Pearlman, and
my colleague Rick Jervis attempt to retrace the life of
our longtime friend and fellow journalist Reggie.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Paine, better known by his rap name Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
We're trying to learn how our life paths differed so sharply,
how the demons of mental illness crept into his life
and why he met set an abrupt death after being
handcuffed on the floor of his parents' home in Sacramento.
This is episode seven The Big Red Handle.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
At the end of episode six, Reggie was being rushed
by ambulance to Sutter Medical Center, four miles north from
the family's home in Sacramento. He was originally destined for
Kaiser Permanent and to a South Sacramento Medical Center, which
was slightly closer, but because of a new virus something
called COVID, had overtaken the facility, he was brought instead
(04:10):
to Sutter. This was February twenty fifth, twenty twenty. He
arrived at the hospital at eight twenty two pm and
was wheeled into the emergency room. Clinging to life.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I know, clinging to life is something we say and
something Sacramento officials certainly said in the aftermath. Or was
there actually life to cling to like? Did Reggie have
a chance of surviving?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
He did show some signs of life, but his condition
was crashing fast. Paramedics were literally performing CPR on him
when they wheeled them into the hospital. Once inside, Reggie
didn't have a pulse for twelve minutes, then suddenly regained
a pulse.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
But then five minutes later he lost it again. That's
how it went that night. They pumped him with meds
to get his heart going. It would be down its
own a few moments, and then it would stop again.
At around ten pm, Reggie couldn't no longer breathe on
his own. He was intubated. Reggie's family raced to the
hospital and arrived to find him in an emergency room cubicle,
(05:14):
comatose and a life support. They were stunned. Earlier that evening,
Reggie seemed okay. Remember Harriet didn't die on nine one
one because she thought her son's life was in danger.
She just needed help with his blood sugar. Rufus feared
the worst, however, when he saw Reggie being wheeled out
of the home after losing consciousness.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Put on Gary kicking out, not till he was dead, No, no, nothing,
it was just I'm faking with.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Harriet's hope faded as she prayed at Reggie's side in
the er. It did not look good.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
We go in there and Reggie's just he's gone. He's gone.
He's breathing because they intubated him, is being breathing for him.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Then they finally tell well, we were keeping hope for
those couple of days, and then they told me he
had multiple heart attacks and multiple struggles.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
They kept this thing on him.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
They we're looking for some brain waves, and no, he
was brain dead.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You know, I think it's important to focus on something here.
You're Reggie's family, you're inside a hospital, and an hour earlier,
there was no reason to think Reggie wouldn't be okay.
This was a diabetic episode. It could have happened to anyone.
So imagine being Harriet who called nine to one one.
She's standing there, standing above her son, this boy she
(06:45):
raised into a man, this charismatic college student, this aspiring journalist,
and now he has a breathing tube down his throat.
Ivs are in his arm, there's beeping, He's not responsive.
Harriet's doesn't see her or hear her. They moved Reggie
out of the ICU. Rick asked Harriet about the long
(07:07):
days that.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Followed, and in that time, was there any hope that
he was going to pull out of it and become.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
Better or well? I think we hoped till the day
before I hoped. I don't know if you guys hoped
to saw some kind of movement one time. Yeah, it
was like the first couple of days.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
Thought some time or the blood fresher went up and
was like, oh, did we excite him too much or something.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
You know.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Reggie was placed in a private room with a single bed,
your basic hospital room. Over the next six days, loved
ones came to pray and stand and wait and hope.
Reggie was raised in the church and his is a
devout believer that Jesus Christ can heal the sick. Miracles happen.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Anyone who has stood vigil in a hospital for someone
critically ill knows how time there stands dreadfully still. It's
a lot of staring at a TV, usually tuned to
the price is right or the local weather, staring at
a monitor at a loved one lying motionless. It's also
a lot of waiting for something anything, a sign, a
(08:31):
finger twitch, a cough. My father died of pincret of
cancer in December of twenty twenty three, and those days
and nights were interminable trips to the cafeteria for a
pudding cup or blessed moments of escapism. It just goes
on and on and on and on. You're locked in
(08:52):
a cell of misery and despair.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
That was Reggie's loved ones. Over that week, they would
enter the room, stay over his bed and pray, pray
as hard as they could, Please save our son, Please
save our brother. And even though they didn't fully grasp
it at the time, something was unfolding that didn't feel
quite right. Inside the hospital, Reggie was hooked to a
(09:16):
breathing machine, but at their home, Harriet and Rufus's phone
was constantly ringing, and those calls were from a homicide detective.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
When her son, Reggie was unconscious at Suttern Medical Center,
Harriet devoted nearly every waking hour to staying by his side.
She would turn on a basketball game or another sporting
event and sit and watch with the sound of the
respirator keeping time. As a longtime nurse, she wanted to
advocate for his care. As a mother facing on speakable trauma,
(09:49):
she just needed to be near her son.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
Like Rich, squeeze my hand if you hear me, no, squeeze,
I know he would squeeze my hand if it's anyway
yet anything in him.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
He would have gave me something, but he couldn't.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Tia Nicholas, Reggie's former girlfriend and mother to his son
also showed up at the hospital the first night and
stayed overnight with the family. For her, seeing Reggie, once
so full of life, laying there, quiet and unresponsive was surreal.
Speaker 7 (10:22):
Almost like it's not real, what's going on? You know,
like WHOA, this is him? I think he made a
slight movement when I said, hey, is Tia, because you know,
through all this time, he's still I think he still
wouldn't have mind had we got back together, although we
hadn't been together for years. And I know he seemed
like he moved his eye.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
But maybe he didn't.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
Maybe it's just what I wanted to see.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
As Harriet came home exhausted each evening, her phone would
inevitably ring. Sometimes it was friends calling a check on her,
and then she started getting calls from a homicide detective
from the Sacramento Police Department. Instead of inquiring about Reggie's
condition or explaining the department's own internal investigation, Reggie's sister says,
(11:05):
the detective would ask about Reggie's background, what he did,
his family lineage.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
I'm how homicide, the expectives calling you again?
Speaker 4 (11:14):
And she and he would She would.
Speaker 6 (11:16):
Keep calling and He's like, oh what isn't how we
usually investigating? And I was like crying, But they kill
people and a homicide investigative are not calling a family
member talking about oh well, who is his biological dad?
Speaker 4 (11:27):
What does his son do?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
With her son still on life support, Harriet didn't give
the calls much thought. She answered questions politely. Reggie's sisters, however,
were much more skeptical.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
They're trying to.
Speaker 6 (11:41):
See who if they did this to, and trying to
build a case on his characters before he was even
off the machine.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Oh well, who is his bilological dad? Oh well, what
is his son do?
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Like?
Speaker 5 (11:51):
Who call it?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Right?
Speaker 4 (11:53):
And I just I do not coalk to them.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
So you're this family and you're going through this incredible
tragedy and it's happening in real time before you, and
people call you from the city and you maybe would
logically presume that they're calling to check in and make
sure your son is okay, and instead you feel like
you're being interrogated and investigated and targeted. And that has
(12:16):
to be just a jarring, jarring thing to experience.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
It's really hard to understand what the police department's trying
to do here. Like, On the one hand, they obviously
have an investigation which they're trying to get into, but
there hasn't been a death yet, and so it's not
a death and custody case, so it's unclear what they're
trying to investigate at this point.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Save for those calls, no one from the city of
Sacramento called to check in on Reggie's condition or offer apologies.
According to the family, none of the rescue workers pop
their heads into his hospital room. Life is in the
empt is a NonStop carousel of trauma, so maybe that's normal,
but behind the scenes, Sacramento officials had to be worried.
(13:00):
They must have read the early internal reports of what
went down of a call for help from a concerned
mother morphing into a black man a life support.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Harriet continued to speak to a homicide detective on the phone,
and a few detectives even visited the hospital. Harriet told
us it felt as if they were checking to see
if he was dead or alive. No emotion, no genuine empathy.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Meanwhile, Reggie was showing few signs of anything. Day after
day passed without a positive signal from Reggie. Neurologists told
the family it didn't look good. Reggie wasn't showing much
of any brain activity. Finally, after six days on life support,
the time came to make a decision.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
They were looking for some brain waves and no, he
was brain dead.
Speaker 8 (13:51):
Then March second, the donor people came to talk to
me in Little Bow It this decided to do it
on the third to take the life support, and we
(14:13):
decided to just let it go.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
On the afternoon of March third, twenty twenty, the staff
at Sutter Medical Center played One Wish by Ray j
one of Reggie's favorite songs, on the floor where Reggie
lay in an operating room where he would be removed
from life support.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
The song blared through the hallway as nurses lined the walls.
Harry and Rufus walked through the procession, tears rimming their eyes,
followed by other family members. Harry entered the room and
sat next to Reggie. Then, as Reggie was disconnected from
the breathing apparatus, she held his head in her arms.
(15:00):
She felt a jolt of energy surged through her.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
I felt his first heartbeat. I heard it, and it
seemed like his heart was just dumping so strong, like
I could just feel it.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
You know.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
It was like boom boom. I'm holding him and I
can just feel his heart like I could just feel it.
I could feel it like inside of me. It was
so strong. I could just feel it, like it was
doing like this to me.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Life dreamed from her firstborn son. As Harriet cradled Reggie's
head and whispered to him.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
I was telling him, don't be scared. Granny and Granpy
is waiting there for you. That's my mother and father
waiting there to take your hands, Bitchie. Don't be scared.
Just relax.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
At five twenty seven pm, Reggie demon Pain died in
his mother's arms at Sutter Medical Center. Forty eight years earlier,
Harriet had felt his first heartbeat, now she had witnessed
his last.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
The coronavirus pandemic was just starting to ramp up across
the United States. Its victims were being isolated in hospitals
and funeral homes, and precautionary measures could delay funerals by weeks,
so the family opted to cremate Reggie's body and have
a quick service for him.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
No autopsy was performed, lacking any specifics on the circumstances
of his death. The doctor who filled out. Reggie's death
certificate listed quote acute respiratory failure with viral pneumonia and
influenza as the cause of death, adding end stage renal
disease with hemodialysis. Anyone reading that would think Reggie simply
(16:59):
cut the flew and his kidneys came out.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Four months later, however, an investigator with the Sacramento County
Coroner's Office reviewed medical records, body camp footage, and other
facts to make an official determination of Reggie's death. She
concluded that quote restraint could not be excluded as contributing
to his death. The cause of death was revised to
(17:23):
sudden cardiac arrest while being restrained in prone position.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Reggie hadn't died from the flu. He died in part
because police had handcuffed him, face down on the floor
with his hands behind his back. A few days after
Reggie was taken off life support, Captain Jeffrey Kleine learned
from his superiors that Reggie had died. If you recall,
Klein was the highest ranking fire official on the scene
(17:52):
that night. He's the one who decided to get police involved.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Klein didn't respond to our request to interview him. He
can't know what he felt at that moment, but a
man he and his colleagues had attended to on a
routine medical call was now dead.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
In fact, ever since the night of the incident, things
didn't appear right. Klein and others testified in depositions, and
he said police were outside the hospital asking the firefighters
for statements while Reggie was still in triage, which he
found very peculiar and beyond the norm. He sensed that
the Sacramento Police Department was maneuvering to pin the blame
(18:30):
on fire.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Klein tried to get its superiors to be proactive, to
launch their own investigators on the case to support him
and the other firefighters there that night. He caught a
deputy fire chief at home that night, waking him up
to inform him of the night's events. He began writing
up emails and sending them to bosses and crafting a
timeline of events. The response, according to Client's testimony, next
(18:57):
to nothing.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
In fire department parlance, Client's push to involve his superiors
is called pulling the big red handle. In his ten
years as a captain, Client told attorneys he never had
felt the need to pull the big red handle, but
here he was, for the first time in his career,
feeling the case would be big and important enough to
(19:19):
get everyone involved, and yet it felt as if his
bosses were dragging their feet.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Klin met with his superiors a few weeks after the
incident for what was called an end in twelve meeting,
name for the truck that ferried them to the scene.
In that meeting, he caught out his bosses for their
lack of support. Here he is describing that meeting in
a deposition months later.
Speaker 9 (19:42):
I think the way I put it in the Engine
twelve discussion, which eventually became a very adversarial media My
question was to our senior staff, why is it For
the first time in ten or twelve years as a captain,
I pulled the big red handle and asked for your health,
but received nothing.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
In the deposition, Klein made it clear he felt as
if he and the other firefighters were on the hot seat,
even though it was the police who had actually placed
Reggie in the pro position and they were not receiving
equal scrutiny. His fears heightened when he heard that city
officials assigned their own investigator, John Parker, to look into
the event rather than wait for fire administrators to conduct
(20:24):
an internal query.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
In his deposition, Kleine said he found the focus on
firefighters to be unfair. Here he is answering questions from
an attorney representing Reggie's family.
Speaker 8 (20:36):
In your mind, did you feel like the police officers
did anything to contribute to mister Paine's debt?
Speaker 9 (20:42):
I did, and I do.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Okay, can you explain that.
Speaker 9 (20:45):
While mister Payne had extensive underlying medical issues, I believed
that the position and level of restraint that was applied
to mister Payne, coupled with his underlying medical conditions, contributed
heavily towards the long term out come.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
To the call, long term outcome meaning is death.
Speaker 9 (21:03):
Yes, mister Payin my understanding is mister Payne expired eight
days after the data to medically.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Remember, this was a few years after the police shooting
death of Joseph Mann and just two years after the
shooting death of Stefan Clark, which sparked widespread protests across Sacramento.
The last thing the police department needed was the death
of a black man in police presence to turn into
a viral story.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Of course, the firefighters weren't completely without fault. EMTs are
expected to follow protocols set under the Sacramento County Emergency
Medical Services Agency, which states specifically that first responders should
quote avoid prone or hobble restraints due to potential for
respiratory arrest and death from asphyxia or aspiration. Even some
(21:54):
top fire department officials have said that Klein and the
medical professionals on scene it would have been more attuned
to Reggi's condition. They should have ordered police to move
him out of that position if they saw him struggling.
But the question remained, do you tell the police how
to restrain if they're the ones with their restraining training.
(22:15):
It was their handcuffs and their tactics after all.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Then on May twenty fifth, another event took place seventeen
hundred miles away. They'd shake up the entire investigation.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I can't breath.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I Sacramento is no different. Already primed by recent protests
over the deaths of Joseph Mann and Stefan Clark at
the hands of police, protesters took to the street.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
On May twenty ninth, just a few days after Floyd's death.
Hundreds of protesters, led by Black Lives Matter activists, poured
into Franklin Boulevard in South Sacramento, chanting say his name
and hands up on block traffic on nearby Highway. Ninety
nine others clashed with police. Two days later, more protests
(23:07):
took place downtown, and several stores were looted and vandalized.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
On June first, Daryl Steinberg, at the time, Sacramento's mayor,
issued a citywide curfew from eight pm to five am.
A few days later, more than one thousand protesters staged
a die in sprawling on a residential street near the
mayor's house. The streets of Sacramento were blazed with protest.
(23:33):
Unlike earlier protests, which were mostly organized and strategic, outsiders
streamed into Sacramento following George Floyd's death, ramping up the temperature.
Protesters were frustrated because they still hadn't seen arrests or
convictions of police officers involved in earlier shootings.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Here's Barry Axius, the longtime Sacramento activist.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
So when twenty twenty come right, the shitty had it's
a fan So here it is. Everyone's in their house.
People are scaredy shit about this covidere where we're cooped
up We're still angry that we didn't get justice for
Stephone Clark. Everything has been exposed, so it's not like
us pertending the shit is not corrupt. We all know
(24:18):
it to be what it is, and still they did
nothing about it.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Everything exploded, and as Sacramento streets exploded with pent up
anger and frustration, city leaders grappled with how to proceed
with another black man who had died in their police
department's custody.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Protests continued in the city from mid May into June
twenty twenty. That month, Captain Kline and the four other
firefighters were placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into
Reggie's death. Meanwhile, the three police officers, David Mauer, John
Helmick and Kevin Mormon, returned to work unscathed.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
We needed to find out why the city went after
the fire fighters in this case and not the police officers.
We can make some assumptions the timing of George Floyd protests,
the temperature on the streets, clined any other firefighters placed
on administrative leave soon after Floyd's death, But our attempts
to gain insight into how all of these were connected
(25:17):
ran into one roadblock after.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Another, a City of Sacramento spokeswoman made it clear that
no one from the city was going to talk to us.
Besides reaching out for comment, we also filed a series
of Freedom of Information Act requests for documents, emails, anything
that could offer glimpses into their investigation. The city replied
with mostly superficial documents, incident reports, and other things previously
(25:42):
released to the public. Nothing that got into the nitty gritty,
nothing that allowed us to peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
We needed a high ranking official with insight into the
behind the scenes machinations who could help us better understand
the city's strategy to go after firefighters full throttle. The
police officers involved. We made more cause, filed more Foyer requests.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
For months, we thought no one would talk to us.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Then someone did. Her name is Gary Zieri or wylast
name is Loch s.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
E h And I was the fire chief of Sacramento,
California's fire department at the time of the incident. On
the next and final episode of Finding Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I guess that he didn't want another George Floyd type
of spotlight on him, and this was to get rid
of the members right away and I'm like, you can't
do that. At one point, one of us just had
a gun in our mouths.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
One of us lost a marriage and a family over this.
Speaker 9 (26:44):
This ran us all through the absolute ringer.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Somebody got to pay for this. Somebody didn't do something right.
I need some answers.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Finding Sexy Sweat is a production and a School of
Humans and iHeart podcasts. This episode was reported, written and
hosted by Jeff Pearlman and Rick Jervis. It was produced
by Gabby Watts with production support from Etily's Perez Zaron
Burnett Is. Our story editor Jesse Niswanger scored and mixed
the episode. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and
(27:20):
Brandon Barr. Please leave the show a review and you
can follow along with the show on Instagram at School
of Humans.
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