Alan Pean, an unarmed black man, checked himself into St. Joseph's hospital in Houston for mental health reasons in August. The hospital tried to discharge him far too quickly, and after Alan became agitated, two off-duty police officers working as security officers were called to the room.
When a Taser didn't work, they shot the unarmed, bedridden man square in the chest. If the bullet was just two millimeters over, he would be dead.
Pulling firearms on a hospital patient is reckless and unwarranted. In October, a federal investigation of the incident found massive problems with St. Joseph, and the hospital's Medicare license is now at risk. Alan's family says "The lack of compassion from St. Joseph Medical Center's management and their reluctance to acknowledge any wrongdoing are unacceptable and troubling." St. Joseph's is pledging only to call armed officers into rooms "only after all other interventions have been exhausted."
Guns have no place in a hospital. As the Surgeon General himself has said, they are a threat to public health. St. Joseph's needs to ban all guns from its place of healing, not just restrict them to lobbies - and its owner, IASIS Healthcare, needs to implement the policy at all its other hospitals, too.
Tell IASIS CEO W. Carl Whitmer: Hospitals should be places of healing! Ban guns from all your properties, so that there are no more Alan Peans!
After Alan Pean, an unarmed, bed-ridden Black man, was shot by your security guards in his hospital room at St. Joseph's in Houston, modest hospital policy tweaks are not enough. Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing, and there is a reason the Surgeon General has said that guns are a threat to public health. I demand that you ban guns from all of your hospitals at once!
