Man Who Died After Fall At Police Station Had Earlier Injury
ABERDEEN, Md. (AP) -- An alcoholic man who died this month after falling and hitting his head inside the Aberdeen police station had been released from a hospital just hours earlier after suffering a seizure, and had been treated for a head injury that same week.
Aberdeen police on Wednesday released surveillance camera footage from April 2 showing Barry Lee Berkenkemper, 59, falling backward and hitting the back of his head on the floor of the booking area of the police station just after an officer removed his handcuffs. Berkenkemper appears to try to steady himself and hike up the waist of his pants before he falls, and did not immediately lose consciousness.
Berkenkemper was taken from the police station to Harford Memorial Hospital and later transferred to Shock Trauma hospital in Baltimore, where he died April 4.
Police spokeswoman Cpl. Shannon Persuhn said authorities are still awaiting autopsy results but do not believe the death is suspicious.
"He had all the signs of being intoxicated," she said.
Meanwhile, documents obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press show that Berkenkemper, who was homeless, was treated at the emergency department of Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air on March 31 for a head injury and alcohol intoxication. He was prescribed a painkiller, told to return if he started experiencing severe headaches or other symptoms, and advised to seek help to try to stop drinking.
Berkenkemper spent that night and the next at an emergency shelter for the homeless in Belcamp, where staff said he suffered a seizure on the night of April 1, shaking uncontrollably and bleeding from the mouth.
But staff at the shelter said the seizure passed after a few minutes, and that Berkenkemper appeared to be alert and conscious by the time emergency responders arrived and took him to a local hospital, from which he was released on the morning of April 2, just hours before he was arrested for public intoxication and disobeying a police officer's order and taken to the police station.
Susan Graper, manager of the Welcome One Emergency Shelter, said Berkenkemper had told her that he had suffered a head injury in mid-March after slipping on some ice. She said shelter staff were saddened by his death.
"We liked Barry.... He was a sweet guy," Graper said.
Dorothy Blevins, a longtime friend of Berkenkemper, said he had called her in mid-March from a local hospital and said he was suffering from a "brain bleed," for which he was later treated at Shock Trauma.
Blevins said she can't understand why he was in and out of hospitals in the days before his death if he was suffering from a serious head injury.
"They took him to the hospital so many times, why didn't they treat him?" she asked. "But it's possible he refused treatment and signed himself out, I don't know."
Blevins said Berkenkemper, who had several run-ins with the law for petty offenses, many of them alcohol-related, was intelligent and friendly, but that he could never overcome his struggle with alcohol. She said he was briefly married several years ago but was an only child with no siblings or children of his own. After working for more than two decades as a glazier in the construction industry, Berkenkemper, who was born in Baltimore, spent the past several years doing odd jobs and shuffling from place to place, Blevins said.
"Barry was an excellent worker, he really was, but in the end, his drinking got the better of him," she said.
(Copyright 2015 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
