Alex Wubbels, a nurse from Utah, talked about her arrest by Salt Lake police detective Jeff Payne while she was working at the University Hospital. She said that the officer needs serious training.
Wubbels was arrested because she refused to give Payne vials of blood that he needed for an investigation. She believed that Payne didn’t meet the mandatory criteria for such a request. The nurse was forced out of the hospital. Payne held her in a police patrol car for about 20 minutes.
“I just feel betrayed, I feel angry. I feel a lot of things. And I am still confused. I’m a health care worker. The only job I have is to keep my patients safe. A blood draw, it just gets thrown around there like it’s some simple thing. But blood is your blood. That’s your property. And when a patient comes in in a critical state, that blood is extremely important and I don’t take it lightly,” Wubbels said.
Wubbels: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong!’
Nurse Wubbels was working her shift on July 26th, 2017 when she was arrested. The cameras recorded the whole incident, and now the nurse talked about her story and how she feels the need to stop that kind of harassment and to improve the training and service of police officers especially towards doctors and nurses.
The situation occurred when a truck driver got seriously burned in a car crash with another vehicle that was fleeing from the police. The driver of the fleeing vehicle was killed. The driver of the truck was in a comatose state when he got to the hospital. Payne was sent to the medical facility to get vials of blood for the investigation. However, he didn’t have warrants, and the patient was unconscious; and therefore was unable to give consent for a blood draw. Moreover, the driver was not facing criminal charges. This made Wubbels refuse to carry out the orders of the officer. She said that blood is a very delicate thing and that the officer didn’t have a warrant or all the needed requirements to ask for that. However, the officer was getting desperate, and he arrested her apparently because she was interfering with a criminal investigation.
“I’m doing what I’m being told by my boss, and I’m going to do what my boss says,” Payne said at one point in the recording. “She’s going to jail,” he claimed in the video.
Supervisors are heard telling Payne that he is making a huge mistake as he handcuffed the nurse.
Wubbels: ‘they needed to go through proper channels’
Wubbels was released with no charges, and she is not planning to present charges against police detective Jeff Payne. She said she didn’t understand why the officer was so angry and so crazy. In the camera video, she is heard crying that she has done nothing wrong and that the whole situation was unnecessary.
Wubbels said that if they wanted the blood from the driver, the officer needed to acquire it through the proper channels. Wubbels said that she did what she had to do and what her boss recommended her to do. She even printed a copy of the policy for blood draws — one that Salt Lake police agreed to more than a year ago, according to Wubbels’ Attorney — and showed it to the officer.
Source: Deseret News Utah