A Filipino American's death inspires police reform in California

SCREEN CAPTURE / KTVU

Angelo Quinto's death spurred calls for police reform in responding to mental health crisis.

A Filipino American's death has prompted new laws that reforms police arrest procedures and mental health treatment.

Gov. Gavin Newsom made California the first state to ban the citation of “excited delirium” as a cause of death.

It was very empowering knowing that what we have done is making a real major impact,” Bella Collins, the sister of the late Angelo Quinto, told NBC Asian America. “But we also remember why we’re there. We remember that my brother is not coming back to life.”

Navy veteran Angelo Quinto’s death has been compared to the death of George FLoyd, the Black man who died while being arrested, and spurred nationwide calls for police reform. Quinto's death motivated Assemblymember Mike Gipson (D-Carson, Watts) to author AB 360, banning the controversial term “excited delirium.”

“This issue was brought to my attention through very tragic circumstances," said Gipson. In 2020, Angelo Quinto, who during a mental health crisis, stopped breathing while two Antioch police officers knelt on his back and neck.

Before he lost consciousness, his mother recalled, he pleaded for his life: “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”

As emergency med-techs transferred him to an amublance, it was noticed that Quinto had turned purple. The ambulance team tried to revive him using CPR. Three days later, the local hopital pronounced him dead.

"Mr. Quinto’s official cause of death was determined to be excited delirium,” Gipson said. “That is absolutely absurd.”

As a new law, California’s coroners can no longer use "excited delierium," a catch-all term as a cause of death in autopsy reports, and law enforcement agencies cannot utilize it in incident reports to explain why a suspect died.

The Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges against Antioch Police Department officers who restrained Quinto and held him facedown. His family had called police because the 30-year-old man was suffering a mental health crisis and needed help. A county pathologist concluded that Quinto died from “excited delirium.”

Quinto’s family later requested a private independent autopsy, and that autopsy concluded Quinto died from suffocation caused by restraint.

For years, the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association has opposed using the term as a legitimate diagnosis.

“Excited delirium is not a reliable, independent medical or psychiatric diagnosis. There are no diagnostic guidelines, and it is not recognized in the DSM-5, which is the main diagnosis guide for mental health providers. The only place where this term is continuously used is to describe deaths that occur in police custody,” Gipson’s office wrote.

AB 360 defined “excited delirium” as a term used to describe “a person’s state of agitation, excitability, paranoia, extreme aggression, physical violence, and apparent immunity to pain that is not listed in the most current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

It took a month after Quinto's death before the Antioch police issued an official report of the incident and only after it was pressed by local media.

After a prolonged investigation, the Contra Costa County District Attorney cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing. The DA's findings provided motivation for the family and their growing number of supporters to continue their fight for accountability and police reform.

On Sept. 30, 2021, Newsom also signed into law the Gipson-sponsored Angelo Quinto Act, which bans all police restraint techniques that cause positional asphyxia, including the techniques used to restrain Quinto.

In May, 2023, the City of Antioch unveiled the Angelo Quinto Community Response Team, who in place of police, will respond to mental health incidents The Community Response Team is trained to calm chaotic situations like Quinto's, rather than suppress them by force.

“They’ve been there at every step of the legislative process,” Gipson said. “Even though the law won’t bring back Angelo, we want to make sure no family has to go through what his family has.”

For Collins, her brother's death also brings to light the need for the Asian American community to combat the cultural stigma mental illnesses. The AANHPI communities have been found less prone to employ mental health services or even to discuss it because of the public shame attached to the condition.

“My brother struggled with his mental health a lot and felt that he couldn’t express it because that might be a weakness,” she said. “As a society, we need to talk about it to normalize it and, in turn, decriminalize it.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow me at Threads.net/eduardodiok, @DioknoEd on Twitter or at the  blog Views From the Edge.