streiff covered this incident earlier today. If you have Internet access, you have seen the video. Even if you have been living under a rock, you have heard about this, because people are running around showing the video to people living under rocks.

Now the police department has inevitably apologized:

Salt Lake City police apologized Friday for arresting a nurse who, citing hospital policy, refused to let officers draw blood from an unconscious accident victim. The arrest of Alex Wubbels, who was later released without charge, was captured on body camera video that the police chief said was alarming.

The incident happened July 26, when an accident victim was admitted to the University of Utah Hospital burn unit in a coma. Though the man was not a suspect in the crash, which killed the other driver, police asked for his blood to be drawn.

Wubbels, the charge nurse in the burn unit, presented the officers with a printout of hospital policy on drawing blood and said their request did not meet the criteria. Hospital policy specified police needed either a judge’s order or the patient’s consent, or the patient needed to be under arrest, before obtaining a blood sample.

“I’m just trying to do what I’m supposed to do. That’s all,” Wubbels tells the officers, according to the body camera video.

If they think the apology is forestalling a lawsuit, I would like to take this opportunity to heartily laugh at them. The lawsuit is coming. The only question is how big the payout will be.

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