Officers Charged Her With Drunken Driving. But Her Brain Was Bleeding.

Driving home from work on the day her life changed forever, Nicole McClure could feel her feet tingling and her sense of direction faltering. Then she noticed colorful lights illuminating the early morning landscape.

“Oh, pretty lights,” she remembers thinking, not realizing that a highway patrol car was coming up behind her. On what was supposed to be a simple drive home from her overnight job at Walmart near Olympia, Wash., Ms. McClure felt increasingly disoriented, and wound up crashing into two roundabouts before pulling over.

The state trooper who had followed her ran to her door with his gun drawn, shouting at her to get out of the car, according to his dash cam video. He demanded to know if she had been drinking or using drugs. She denied it. “I’m not feeling real well,” she said. The trooper was not convinced. She was taken to jail, accused of driving under the influence.

The arrest was the beginning of a more than 24-hour ordeal in the criminal justice system at a time when Ms. McClure was in desperate need of medical care. Her lawyers said she was left lying in her own urine on the floor of a cell as jail employees, apparently dismissing her as being drunk, taunted her. When someone finally realized she needed medical attention, records show, doctors discovered a brain bleed and rushed her into surgery. She spent 17 days in the hospital and emerged no longer able to work or to care for herself.

Ms. McClure’s case, detailed in a lawsuit, records and interviews, offers a jarring look into how the speedy assumptions law enforcement officers sometimes make during traffic stops can have devastating consequences.