Sudbury police 'unlawfully' detained Indigenous academic after she faced hospital racism, lawsuit alleges
CBC
An Indigenous academic says she was unlawfully detained by police after she faced racial discrimination from medical staff at a hospital in Sudbury, Ont., according to a recently filed $300,000 lawsuit.
Tasha Beeds, of nêhiyaw, Scottish-Métis, and Bajan ancestry, said Sudbury police detained her under the provincial Mental Health Act and forced her to return to the Health Sciences North hospital, the lawsuit against the hospital and the police alleged.
Beeds left the hospital after she overheard medical staff laughing, saying she was "just looking for attention" and that she was "drunk" after Beeds collapsed on the floor and lost control of her bodily functions, the lawsuit, filed in March, said.
"I don't want anyone to feel what I felt that day at the hospital," said Beeds, in an interview with CBC News.
"I experienced severe depression and trauma and it triggered and impacted me so deeply."
Beeds lectures at the University of Saskatchewan and University of Windsor. She is also the inaugural Indigenous scholar at the Anako Indigenous Research Institute at Carleton University.
Sudbury police said in an emailed statement to CBC News that it could not provide comment, because the matter was before the courts.
The force's statement of defence said the "officers acted in a careful and prudent manner in accordance with the standard of care expected of reasonable police officers dealing with someone in apparent physical and psychological distress."
The hospital said in an emailed statement that it could not specifically comment "on this matter," but it takes "complaints related to discrimination very seriously."
In its statement of defence, Health Sciences North said a nurse "tended" to Beeds while she was on the floor, but she "began swearing at the nurse and taking issue with the length of time it took to see her." The document alleged that Beeds left the hospital against the advice of the nurse.
Beeds denied a nurse tried to help her while she lay on the floor or that anyone asked her to stay.
"No one tried to help me," she said.
"I have been a nurse for 45 years and I've never treated anybody the way she was treated," said Rose Beeds, Natasha Beeds's mother.
Rose Beeds went to the hospital that day to give her daughter a change of clothes.
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