California couple who assisted sheriff can’t seek damages for brutal attack, court says
Nine years ago, a rural California sheriff’s corporal called Jim and Norma Gund and asked them to check on their neighbor, who had called 911 and hung up. When the Gunds arrived, a murderer armed with a Taser and hunting knife attacked the couple and almost killed them.
Did the Gunds become de facto deputies when they agreed to help Cpl. Ron Whitman, or were they just being good neighbors?
On Thursday, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office in a case that sought to answer whether people who volunteer to help law enforcement should be entitled to sue for damages if they get hurt, or if they’re merely eligible for workers’ compensation as employees.
“We conclude the Gunds were indeed engaged in ‘active law enforcement service,’” the Supreme Court wrote Thursday. “When the Gunds provided the requested assistance, they delivered an active response to the 911 call of a local resident pleading for help. A response of this kind unquestionably falls within the scope of a police officer’s law enforcement duties.”
The sheriff’s attorneys argued the Gunds were volunteers and only entitled to workers’ compensation for their injuries.
In its written legal arguments, the county cited “posse comitatus,” a term that harkens to the days of the Old West, when sheriffs could conscript any citizen into an officer of the law on the spot. Posse comitatus has become controversial in recent years as tensions have risen after high-profile cases of officers using excessive force on minorities.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled it didn’t matter to the case that the officer omitted key details which the Gunds said would have made them much more cautious upon approaching their neighbor’s home. Under an arcane section of state employment law, law enforcement volunteers can’t sue an agency for damages — no matter what.
“Whether or not any alleged omissions in Corporal Whitman’s request could conceivably prove relevant to legal actions alleging malfeasance, they do not change our conclusion about the scope of workers’ compensation in this tragic case,” the court ruled.
Meeting a murderer
The Gunds’ story, which raises troubling questions about the lack of law enforcement in the vast rural reaches of California, began March 13, 2011, in the remote former timber town of Kettenpom, about 250 miles north of San Francisco.
That afternoon, Whitman called them, asking to check on their neighbor, Kristine Constantino, who lived about a quarter mile away. He told Norma the call was “probably no big deal” and likely related to a snowstorm that was blowing in. He was making his way there, but because of the storm it would take him several hours to bisect the huge rural county.
The Gunds contend Whitman neglected to mention that a California Highway Patrol dispatcher who took the 911 call told him she heard a woman whispering “Help ... help …” before hanging up.
The dispatcher told Whitman she was leery of calling the number back because she didn’t want to alert a possible assailant, the Gunds claim.
After receiving Whtiman’s call, Norma and Jim drove their Ford pickup to Constantino’s home.
Norma Gund walked to the home while Jim waited in their truck. A man she had never seen before met her outside. She asked him about Constantino, and he said she was fine. Norma said she wanted to be sure, and the man escorted her into the house.
The bodies of Constantino, 33, and her boyfriend Christopher “Sky” Richardson, 26, were wrapped in plastic on the floor.
Their killer, Tomas Gouverneur, a musician from Corvallis, Ore., shocked Norma Gund with a stun gun as she entered the house. He slashed her throat, head and face with a hunting knife. The blade opened her carotid artery and cut her trachea in half, Jim Gund said.
When Jim Gund entered the house to check on his wife, Gouverneur attacked him, too. “I had never been in a fight in my life,” Jim Gund told The Bee in 2018. “He had a Taser, a knife, a black belt in karate and he outweighed me.”
After being shocked and stabbed, Jim Gund bit the assailant’s arm until he dropped the knife. Gouverneur fled in his teal Subaru. After leading sheriff’s deputies in neighboring Mendocino County on a 40-mile chase, he fatally crashed into an oak tree on Highway 101.
In his car, authorities found bags of marijuana and $11,000 in cash taken from Constantino’s home.
Norma Gund, blood gushing from her neck, managed to drive to Kettenpom’s only store as her husband fought with Gouverneur. Struggling to speak through her damaged throat, she had to scribble what happened on a notepad.
Medics eventually flew her to UC Davis Medical Center, where she underwent multiple surgeries to reconstruct her face and her neck. Jim Gund, who later made his way to the store as well, suffered less serious injuries.
Sheriff’s shifting stories
Initially, the sheriff’s office disputed the Gunds’ version of what Whitman had said during the phone call. In statements to local media, the sheriff’s office said Whitman told Norma Gund to stay put and see if she could see anything from her home.
“At no time was Mrs. Gund instructed to go to Kristine’s residence,” the statement said. “Nor would the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office ever send a citizen to perform a deputy’s job.”
But the county’s story shifted in court after the Gunds sued.
The county’s attorneys said the corporal asked Norma Gund to go to Constantino’s house to see if she was OK, but Whitman advised her not to go without her husband. The department also acknowledged the deputy had suggested the call might be related to the snowstorm.
The Gunds contended that they weren’t told key details, including that Constantino was whispering on the phone, that the CHP dispatcher believed she had been trying to call secretly, or that a county dispatcher’s return calls to Constantino went straight to voicemail.
The Supreme Court said Thursday that Norma Gund asked Whitman what Constantino said on the call, and Whitman responded that she said, “Help me.”
“Mrs. Gund then inquired: ‘Are you sure? Is that all she said?’” the judges wrote. “Corporal Whitman responded, ‘She said two words, ‘Help me.’ ”
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Joshua Groban wrote that the majority ruling wrongly concluded that “even lies do not matter.”
“The majority’s view is premised on an assumption I cannot accept: An unarmed, untrained middle-aged couple, by stumbling upon an active murder scene, were in fact working as law enforcement officers,” Groban wrote.
“Moreover, the rule embraced by the majority — one that allows peace officers to omit crucial information or even to lie in order to convince civilians to render assistance without risking tort liability — will only disincentivize civilians from agreeing to help.”
The sheriff’s Sacramento attorney, John Whitefleet, didn’t reply Thursday to an emailed message seeking comment.
The Gunds sought $10 million after the attack.
A separate federal civil rights suit the Gunds filed has been put on hold, pending the resolution of the state case. The couple’s attorney, Ben Mainzer of Eureka, said his clients are going to continue to seek justice in federal court instead of in Trinity County.
“The only thing that changes is the case will be tried in Sacramento, not Weaverville,” he said.
This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 10:31 AM with the headline "California couple who assisted sheriff can’t seek damages for brutal attack, court says."