‘Please take me to Alexandria Hospital’: A Virginia man died after police allegedly drove past it and left him in a patrol car outside a jail
Officers ‘hardly looked at him,’ the complaint states.
A man arrested for public intoxication in Alexandria, Virginia, sat cuffed in a cruiser at the jail for 40 minutes until officers saw he had stopped responding, a suit alleges. According to Atlanta Black Star, Allan Tucker II was 32 when he died after his Aug. 15, 2025, arrest, and Sandra Jones, who is his mother, sued on Oct. 22.
The lawsuit states that Tucker was knocking on doors and shouting “call 911” in his apartment building before officers arrived. He had earlier phoned police himself after mentioning to his brother that he thought someone was in the apartment. Officers went through the unit where he lived with his father two times and found nobody inside.
Police arrested him when he declined to go back in. The suit describes Tucker as hallucinating, under intense stress and under the influence of drugs, and says his demeanor turned to visible panic in the cruiser.
Tucker reportedly asked for a hospital
As Chelsea Henry, the transporting officer, drove by the hospital, Tucker pleaded, “Please take me to Alexandria Hospital,” the complaint states. It cites a department directive that routes arrestees asking for medical care to a hospital ahead of jail booking. The suit alleges Henry heard the requests but kept driving.
The two officers, Henry and William McGinnis, reached the Alexandria Adult Detention Center at about 6:11 p.m. Staff warned of slower intake because of a shift change, and Tucker stayed in the vehicle for roughly 40 minutes. The suit alleges the officers talked and complained about the delay. It adds that they looked at their phones and “hardly looked at him.”
The suit concedes that officers looked in around 6:36 p.m., believing he was breathing, but says they did not react when he began convulsing before going still. The department gave another version at a briefing in August 2025. It stated that officers stayed close, checked on him visually from time to time and called the jail’s staff on three occasions about the holdup, The Alexandria Brief reported.
At about 6:51 p.m., McGinnis saw that Tucker had stopped responding and asked for a medic from the jail. Henry reported a “possible overdose.” Officers gave Narcan, which targets opioids and does not counter cocaine or alcohol poisoning, and tried to revive him. The time of death was 7:27 p.m.
The complaint adds that “there is no reason to believe that Mr. Tucker’s life couldn’t have been saved.” Deaths in custody have drawn attention elsewhere this year, as ICE releasing detainees before they died showed. The medical examiner found that cocaine and cocaethylene intoxication caused the death and ruled it accidental. Prosecutors decided against filing charges in January 2026, and questions about police decisions can outlast that step, as a Baltimore teen’s ankle monitor case showed.
In June, the city’s police auditor, Ameratu Kamara, concluded that the officer who drove Tucker broke policy by not getting him medical care. She also found the officer did not watch him closely enough. ALXnow reported that the City Council later found that report incomplete and called for more investigation, and that Kamara resigned in early October.
Both officers were back on full duty by February, ahead of the report’s release. The city offered no comment on the suit because of pending litigation.
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