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After placing him in a constraint device, Elk Grove police left a man in the back seat of a vehicle for 10 minutes while he screamed for help, according to new video footage obtained by The Sacramento Bee.
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Scott Saetern — a 37-year-old unarmed man who was experiencing a mental health crisis at a gas station in June 2025 — eventually lost consciousness while in the backseat, and died the next day.
After reviewing a clip of the footage, a law enforcement expert, who trains officers on asphyxia risks nationwide, said the officers appear to have violated the polices and rules of both devices they used in Saetern’s detainment. EGPD said it does not consider the death to fall under state laws that aim to increase transparency of deaths in custody and has not said whether the officers involved were disciplined.
“The individual laying on his back was in obvious distress,” said Ed Obayashi, a Modoc County deputy and longtime police expert, after reviewing part of the footage. “If they were away for 10 minutes, you can’t do that.” Obayashi said he does not know if the officers did anything wrong in this case.
Sgt. Jason Jimenez, an EGPD spokesperson, noted that the coroner’s office determined cocaine toxicity as the cause of death.
“The Forensic Pathologist specifically found ‘no evidence of life-threatening injury or impairment inflicted by law enforcement,’” Jimenez said.
Jimenez also said an officer looked at Saetern through a window several times. That does not appear to be shown in the videos The Bee obtained.
Saetern’s parents, represented by longtime civil rights attorney Mark Merin, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against Elk Grove and its police department in September 2025. The suit is still ongoing.
“This is just another horrible example of total mistreatment of somebody who obviously had a medical psychiatric problem and was demonstrating that at the time of their contact,” Merin said. “They should immediately have recognized that and treated him as someone who was mentally ill and not as a criminal … they are totally responsible for this in-custody death.”
Video, news release differ on key details
EGPD announced Saetern’s death in a June 30, 2025, news release, which stated police were called after a man was trying to gain access to employee-only areas of a gas station. While officers tried to handcuff the man, he resisted. They placed him in WRAP restraint, the release said. A WRAP restraint is a full-body device that uses straps to limit a person’s movement, including kicking, and is generally used to secure someone for transport.
“The individual was placed in the back seat of a patrol vehicle, positioned face-up and semi-upright with officers checking on him,” the release said.
However the police video footage shows officers left Saetern laying flat on his back in a spit hood and unattended for 10 minutes— clear violations of national policies regarding those tools, a police expert said.
Obayashi pointed out that the EGPD policy on spit hoods requires monitoring — language that is also widely adopted by departments across the state.
“Those who have been placed in a spit hood should be continually monitored and shall not be left unattended until the spit hood is removed,” the EGPD policy manual states.
In addition, materials from the WRAP Restraint, a Loomis-based company that sells the devices across the country, say that people in the restraints should not be left unattended, Obayashi said.
What the video shows
Six body-worn cameras as well as a vehicle camera showing the back seat recorded a total of more than two hours of footage, which The Bee obtained.
It does not include footage that precedes his restraint, but it does include police interviews with witnesses who recount what happened.
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According to the interviews, at around noon on June 28, 2025, Saetern told a gas station employee that someone was trying to break into his car and he wanted to call the police. The employee watched the security footage and found that nobody was breaking in. Saetern walked around the gas station in distress, entered the staff office, exited it and entered it again. A customer likely called police, the employee can be heard telling the officer on the footage.
The first two officers arrived to find Saetern sitting on a curb. He told them someone was trying to break into a car, and there was blood in the back seat. The officer checked and found no signs of break-ins or blood. Saetern tried to go back in the store. Then the officers try to handcuff him.
At that point the video footage starts. Four more officers arrived and assisted in the handcuffing. They lay his face on the asphalt for nearly three minutes, the high temperature that day hitting 100 degrees. Once handcuffed and unable to move Saetern into the back of the car, with Saetern resisting and yelling “help call the police,” the officers place him in the WRAP restraint.
At 12:39 p.m., with Saetern lying in the back seat, the officers close both backseat doors. A few seconds later, Saetern screams an expletive, and one officer opens the door, puts a spit hood on his head, and closes it again.
Saetern is then heard saying, “I’m tired. I need water. I need water. I need water … I’m so thirsty I’m so thirsty… I feel dizzy… I feel so dizzy. I can’t breathe…they lied about it … I have photos… I’m thirsty, I can’t breathe…”
His speech then becomes quieter and more garbled. At 12:47 p.m. he stops moving and talking. At 12:49 p.m., an officer opens the door to check on him and finds him unresponsive without a pulse.
The officers do CPR and call the fire department, whose personnel transports him to the hospital. He never regained consciousness. He died the next day, on June 29.
Not all custody-deaths covered by state law
Looking to increase police transparency and accountability, California lawmakers in 2018 passed Senate Bill 1421, which requires police departments to release disciplinary records and video footage of, among other things, uses of force that cause death or serious injury. In 2023, lawmakers passed SB 519, which requires them to release records and footage for deaths in jails and prisons.
However, if the coroner determines a cause of death that is not clearly caused by police, such as a medical emergency during a detainment, and it didn’t happen at the jail, departments may not need to release the records under the current laws, said David Loy of the First Amendment Coalition.
Although Saetern’s official cause of death was cocaine, Obayashi still considers deaths that happen after people go unconscious during detainments as in-custody deaths. He said often when the families file wrongful death suits, they secure their own autopsy expert who finds that the force was indeed the cause.
Compression, either by WRAP devices or many officers piling on to someone restricting air flow, are the most common police deaths after shootings, Obayashi said.
“It’s not a baton, a taser, or a K9,” said Obayashi. “But even the most well-intentioned restraint methods can result in tragic circumstances. That’s what I’m seeing consistently … The legislature has said, ‘we don’t care how they died, the fact is that they did die.’”
Saetern’s comments about falsely believing there was blood in his car are consistent with behaviors of someone in active psychosis — a condition that can occur with or without drugs, said Corinne McIntosh Sako, a psychologist who’s a member of Sacramento County’s Behavioral Health Commission.
She said mental health professionals are better suited than police to respond to those calls, and the officers should have called the county’s Community Wellness Response Team. EGPD has not responded to an inquiry about whether it called the team.
“They have the training and understanding needed to work with someone that is experiencing acute psychotic symptoms, help them de-escalate their crisis, and get them to where they need to go to receive treatment for their mental illness,” she said.
Loy urged EGPD to release the disciplinary records in the Saetern case.
“It’s important to know how a police department responded to a death in custody,” Loy said. “Did they do a full investigation? If there was a policy violation, was there accountability? … The last thing the public wants is an out of control officer who never gets disciplined. I can’t speak to the officers in this incident. This is not about being anti-police. It’s about the public having the right to know.”
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This story was originally published September 21, 2026 at 10:30 AM.