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.
