It’s been more than a month since Barbara Nichols’ husband died, but she’s still looking for answers.

Jerry Nichols died Aug. 20, eight days after a Bend police officer used a Taser on him during an altercation outside the St. Charles Bend emergency room. Nichols went into cardiac arrest that day and never regained consciousness.

Now, as his wife continues to grieve, she’s also waiting: for the Oregon Medical Examiner’s Office to release his cause of death and death certificate, to speak to someone at the hospital about protocols she believes could have prevented the altercation in the first place and for the Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office to finish its investigation.

“I want answers. I want to make it right so no one else has to go through this,” Barbara Nichols said Tuesday.

Host of maladies

The Nicholses, married in 1997, moved from southern California to Central Oregon just last year, first settling in Deschutes River Woods. The pair liked to camp and travel in their RV. They had dogs, cats and a host of birds.

“There was something about him I really liked,” she said. “We had a lot of fun together.”

In 2002, Jerry Nichols’ health began to fail. After he lost his balance and burned himself a few times on the woodstove at their Crooked River Ranch home, the couple moved to a home off of Reed Market Road.

He had a host of health problems. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, the result, his wife said, of his two tours in Vietnam with the U.S. Marine Corps. There was high blood pressure and anxiety and sometimes, paranoia.

After triple-bypass heart surgery that year, Jerry, disoriented, pulled out his IV tubes and tried to leave the hospital.

In October 2011, she said, her husband was hospitalized at St. Charles Bend with kidney failure and pneumonia. Barbara Nichols said the staff restrained him because they were worried he’d try to remove a breathing ventilator.

He also suffered from diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also known as COPD, and she said he had situs inversus, in which the heart and other organs are opposite where they should be. As a child, she said, he and his twin brother survived polio.

“Code gray”

In spite of his various illnesses, he remained strong. Then, a few years ago, a doctor told the couple that Nichols was suffering from mild dementia.

Barbara Nichols said he became more irritable. He didn’t drive very well, she said, but insisted he was fine. He was stubborn, antsy. For awhile, he worked with a horse at a local equine rescue program. But Barbara said he began thinking he’d paid for the horse and wanted to bring it home. There had been no payments, she said. That hit him hard.

In the year he lived in Bend, Jerry Nichols visited St. Charles Bend four times. His trip to the emergency room on Aug. 12 was his fifth and last.

Barbara Nichols said she took her husband to the ER that day because his oxygen levels were so low. She tried to fix it at home, but nothing was working. So she took him to the hospital. There, she said, he was “nasty and snappy, suspicious and paranoid.”

She said she told the doctors he suffered from dementia, and should be put in restraints. But they didn’t restrain him, and frustrated, she stepped into the lobby. Five minutes later she heard “code gray” over the speakers, a signal in hospitals that an emergency management response is needed for a combative person with no visible weapon.

Apparently, Nichols had removed his IV and his oxygen. According to police, he assaulted hospital workers and then left the ER.

“As long as nobody touched him he’d have been fine,” Barbara Nichols said. “But they didn’t know how to deal with him.”

He’d been there four times in the past year, so they could have seen from his chart notes that he got easily irritated and combative and may need to be restrained.

“The way he was behaving, you could tell he was not in his right mind,” she said.

Under investigation

Officials at St. Charles Bend declined comment on the case. In a prepared statement, spokeswoman Lisa Goodman wrote: “Per HIPAA privacy rules, we are not at liberty to discuss Jerry Nichols’ case. We respect our patients’ constitutional and statutory rights, and have developed restraint protocols in accordance with Medicare, The Joint Commission and Oregon law.”

According to an Oregon State Police press release, 7 p.m. when Nichols around 7 p.m. sat on a picnic table outside the ER with a security officer. Bend Police Officer Steve Craig responded to the 911 calls.

The OSP reported that video footage shows that as Craig got out of his car, Nichols rose and headed for the officer. Craig tried to talk to Nichols, the video purportedly shows, but Nichols raised his fists at Craig. The officer retreated, and Nichols punched at him. Craig then shot his Taser at Nichols, but the Taser didn’t stop him, according to the OSP account.

At that point, Craig apparently cuffed Nichols on the left side of his head, and Nichols fell down. Craig and a hospital staff member tried to handcuff Nichols, who began to have a heart attack.

The Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office denied public records requests for copies of the video and 911 tapes, citing an open investigation. Deputy District Attorney Steve Gunnels said the office is still investigating the incident and is awaiting a report from the medical examiner.

Taser policy

According to Bend Police Lt. Chris Carney, Craig is back on active duty.

A 2008 article in The Bulletin stated that Deschutes County law enforcement agencies using Tasers did not use the devices on pregnant women, children, the elderly or infirm or anyone who has a known medical condition that could be exacerbated by a shock. The agencies also will not shoot someone with the Taser unless they can hit a target zone, like the torso and the legs, but not the groin. That still stands today, Carney said.

Officers must be “Taser certified” before they can carry the weapon, meaning at least one day of training and practice, and the agencies only use the weapon on people posing a danger to themselves or others.

Using a Taser is just one option on a spectrum of choices ranging from physical presence to deadly physical force. For example, a police officer could start out simply using verbal instructions, but if a person comes at an officer with fists raised, the officer would be within department policy to respond with the use of a Taser, Carney said.

Barbara Nichols believes her husband’s behavior wasn’t malicious, but instead his last attempts to stay alive.

“His body was trying to survive,” Barbara Nichols said. “He wanted to live, he was trying to get oxygen.”

Death certificate

Nichols died eight days after the incident. His wife said he never regained consciousness but suffered seizures over the course of the week.

“I told him, ‘You don’t have to fight anymore,’ ” she said. “Maybe he heard what I said.”

Barbara Nichols said she doesn’t fault anyone at the police department, although she doesn’t believe her husband should have been shot with a Taser. Her concern, she said, is patients are aggressive or panicky for a variety of reasons, and hospital staff needs to differentiate between them when they contact the police.

Jerry Nichols’ body was released to his wife after the autopsy. But because Nichols’ death was under investigation, the body was sent to the Oregon Medical Examiner’s Office. The office must issue a cause of death and has told Barbara Nichols that likely won’t come for at least two months because it is awaiting toxicology reports. Without a cause of death, Barbara can’t get a death certificate.

And without a death certificate, she can’t qualify for her husband’s veteran, Social Security and pension benefits. She’s living on her own Social Security benefit, and when that runs short she’s visiting food banks and trying to make ends meet.

And while she waits for answers, she remembers her husband.

“He was the best man in my life,” she said. “I really miss him. He helped me a lot.”