SACRAMENTO, Calif. — By the time Yuba City police found Joe Nevis on a sidewalk at 1:11 a.m. Dec. 24, 2016, they decided he was too drunk to take to jail, and instead had him taken to Rideout Memorial Hospital in nearby Marysville.
Nevis spent 20 minutes at the hospital, where Dr. Hector Lopez noted that he was wet and smelled of alcohol, but determined that Nevis was medically stable, able to walk in a straight line and could be discharged, lawyers say.
The construction worker then left the hospital at 2:02 a.m. and walked off without waiting for his discharge papers, and less than an hour later somehow ended up lying on nearby railroad tracks, where the Amtrak Coast Starlight train headed north toward Klamath Falls, Oregon, sliced off his legs and kept going, with the engineers unaware of the incident, lawyers say.
Now, six years later, the 34-year-old Nevis is sitting in a wheelchair accompanied by his service dog in a federal courtroom in Sacramento, where jurors in his negligence lawsuit are expected to decide in the coming weeks: Who’s to blame?
Nevis’ attorney contends the rail company, the hospital and Lopez all are liable, and that evidence presented over the next three to four weeks in his lawsuit will show Nevis is due a payout to compensate him for the lifetime of suffering he has ahead of him.
Attorney Raymond McElfish said in his opening statement Thursday that he’ll be presenting experts to tally up how much Nevis is owed, an amount he did not specify in court, but told jurors, “It’s a big number.”
Court filings by McElfish are more specific, saying Nevis’ economic damages for past and future loss “amount to approximately $7,694,831.50 before pain and suffering damages are even considered.”
“Considering what plaintiff has been through and how his life has been altered, and what he will be facing for the rest of his life, plaintiff will ask the jury for $25,000,000 for past and future pain,” McElfish wrote.
That would put the damages sought at about $32.7 million.
Lawyers for the defendants — the hospital, the doctor and Amtrak, formally known as the National Railroad Passenger Corp. — had a different point of view.
“When a person trespasses on private property in the middle of the night and lays his legs on tracks that he knows to be active, he cannot blame a train for running over him,” Amtrak attorney Jason Schaff told jurors.
Lawyers for Lopez and the hospital made similar statements, saying he was assessed and treated appropriately at the hospital before he was discharged into the night.
“The evidence will be that Mr. Nevis was stable,” Lopez attorney Brad Hinshaw told jurors. “Yes, he was under the effects of alcohol, but he was able to function. ...
“There’s no evidence in the record that Mr. Nevis was falling-down drunk.”
Rideout attorney Chad Couchot said Nevis was properly assessed and that Nevis agreed to be discharged, then left without waiting for his discharge papers.
“What happens next is a bit of a mystery ...” Couchot said. “We don’t know how he got to the live tracks. We don’t know why he wasn’t able to get off the live tracks as the train approached.”
Because Nevis contends he remembers nothing about the incident since the afternoon before he lost his legs, jurors will have to decide which of the various experts expected to testify to believe.
“I don’t remember the incident at all,” Nevis said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2017, shortly after his lawsuit was originally filed. “I remember waking up in the pitch black feeling like my legs were numb, like I’ve been walking through snow all day.
“I couldn’t see my legs. ... I felt down and felt my shinbone, so I knew something bad had happened.”
McElfish, his attorney, contends Nevis was prematurely discharged from the hospital, and that no one administered a blood-alcohol test.
“So he was in the hospital all of 20 minutes and seen by Dr. Lopez for seven minutes and they let him go,” McElfish said.
No one disputes Nevis had a problem with alcohol in the past, with McElfish noting that his troubles began in 2008 when Nevis was 20 and his mother was killed in a traffic accident.
“This was a devastating thing for this young man, and he turned to alcohol and drugs,” McElfish said. “It took control of his life for about eight years or more.”
In April 2016, Nevis checked into a rehabilitation center in Yuba City called Buddy’s House, and by Dec. 23 of that year was working at remodeling homes. That day was a Friday — payday for Nevis — and he cashed his paycheck of about $800 at an area Bel Air and planned to take a bus home.
On the way, McElfish said, he ran into a former friend from his old life, and his memory after that is largely a blank.
Police found him on a sidewalk after 1 a.m., and had an ambulance take him to Rideout. After that, Nevis left the hospital and walked off.
No one knows how or why he ended up on the tracks, where he lay dressed in jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt.
A video of the incident recorded by a camera in the front of the locomotive captured the train running over Nevis at 2:50 a.m., and was shown to jurors Thursday morning.
But neither of the two engineers working on the Coastal Starlight that night knew the train had hit anything until two days later, with Schaff, the Amtrak attorney, saying their position in the cabin is 15 feet above the ground and 4 feet back, leaving a blind spot directly in front.
He noted that moisture in the air that cold night was coating the tracks and throwing up a glare, and that engineers have other duties to attend to on board, including checking paperwork for instructions about how to handle trains in different segments of the tracks.
“Train operators don’t sit with their eyes glued to the track looking for trespassers in the middle of the night,” he said. “They are working.”
Nevis, whose left leg was amputated above the knee and his right leg below the knee, remained along the tracks for hours until he was found by a man riding by on a motorcycle, and he was taken for surgery to Rideout.
Schaff said Nevis has told varying stories since then, initially telling paramedics he was defecating on the train tracks, then telling police a week later he only remembered falling and hurting his ankle and being robbed of $800. Schaff said Nevis also denied using alcohol or drugs before the incident, although his lawsuit says “that at some point he consumed alcohol.”
Since then, Nevis has maintained he has no memory of what happened.
“People make mistakes, and sometimes we make mistakes that have serious consequences,” Schaff told jurors. “Your role in the next four weeks is to decide who’s really responsible for it.
“I think you’re going to find the only person responsible for this incident was Mr. Nevis.”
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