HOUSTON – A Houston man said that while consoling his wife inside an emergency room a person working in the hospital put him in a chokehold and threw him to the ground.
DeVonte Davis says it happened Saturday night inside Memorial Hermann at the Texas Medical Center.
He says his wife’s car was totaled in a car accident. Davis’ instinct was to take her to the emergency room. But they said their visit turned into a nightmare.
“Once we had made the decision to go ahead and discharge there was a confrontation between her and another nurse, Davis said. “My attempts to keep my wife calm and reserved, a nurse, a white man came up behind me and he put me in a choke hold and slammed me on the ground.”
“And I asked him what are you doing,” Davis’ wife Nur Almusawi explained. “And he said ‘he had his hands on your face’ and I said that’s my husband and another nurse was like he was trying to keep her calm and he still would not get up.”
Almusawi says she and nurses were yelling at the man to get off of her husband.
“It took the female security guard to come up and pick my husband up and move him away to get that man away from him,” she recalled. “I’ve never seen my husband shake or cry like that before and that wasn’t okay.”
“The only thing he really said was ‘he had his hands on her face.’ That was his only justification,” Davis said.
A spokesperson with Memorial Hermann confirmed an incident did occur on the evening of October 23, involving a UT Health employee grabbing a visitor of the hospital. The UT Health employee had authorization to be at the hospital and a Memorial Hermann security guard was involved in de-escalating the situation.
“I definitely feel like I was targeted because I was Black and my wife wasn’t,” Davis said.
Memorial Hermann says they are investigating the incident. Meanwhile, Tuesday the couple contacted Houston police who referred them to Texas Medical Center police.
“To go through something like this I would say is every wife’s worst nightmare,” Nur said.
“I’m here but I might not of been and I don’t want this to continue to happen because I realize now that it’s just too easy to assume that it’s okay to do this to someone like me,” Davis said.
KPRC 2 also reached out to a spokesperson for UT Health who said they are reviewing the matter.