EVERETT — An Everett man’s death was not the fault of two sheriff’s deputies who detained him in late 2017, according to the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office.
Josh Hooyboer, 40, stopped breathing while on the ground and in handcuffs late on Dec. 28, 2017.
An autopsy showed his death was caused by excited delirium, with bipolar disorder and an enlarged heart being factors, Prosecutor Adam Cornell wrote in a memorandum obtained by The Daily Herald.
Hooyboer, who grew up here, survived non-Hodgkin lymphoma in his 30s. He’d been diagnosed with mental illness and had struggled with drugs. He finished a drug rehab program in fall 2017, and was doing well, his father told the newspaper in 2018.
But in the months preceding his death, Hooyboer suffered from grand mal seizures. He’d spent Christmas Day in the hospital, and had been released just hours before the 911 call.
That night he had another seizure. He spoke in nonsense phrases, repeated that he needed to go outside and pushed past his father to get to the door. Hooyboer fell to the floor. He crawled off the steps and fell into a pile of garden tools. He kept crawling across the driveway.
Two Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies were the first to arrive at the Hooyboer home around 8:30 p.m., in a trailer park along Highway 99. Both deputies were hired about a year earlier.
Hooyboer was flailing face-down on asphalt, according to the letter. The deputies put him in handcuffs. One deputy put a knee on his back, patted his head and begged him to take it easy.
“They couldn’t have been kinder, to tell you the truth,” Hooyboer’s father, Dan Hooyboer, said in 2018.
Seconds later the deputies noticed the detained man had stopped breathing. Deputies performed CPR. Paramedics arrived but could not revive him.
Josh Hooyboer was pronounced dead at 9:25 p.m.
Both deputies were put on administrative leave, briefly.
The Snohomish County Multi-Agency Response Team announced weeks ago that the team had finished an investigation into the case, as well as four others. The cadre of local detectives, known as SMART, piece together what happened in in-custody deaths and police shootings.
The prosecutor concluded April 9 that neither deputy acted inappropriately in 2017.
“Rather, the deputies were trying to save Mr. Hooyboer from hurting himself and others,” Cornell wrote. “In doing so, they had no intention to harm him and their minimal use of force was not a cause of Mr. Hooyboer’s death.”
Caleb Hutton: 425-339-3454; chutton@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snocaleb.
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