Police defend handcuffing Huntley doctor tending to Sun City resident

Internist Moshe Zamir rushed to the rescue when a patient drove a golf cart down a ravine and into a tree near his Huntley practice.

But soon after, Zamir's gusto to save his patient landed him in trouble with the authorities.

The 87-year-old man, a resident of Sun City-Huntley, was attempting to park outside Zamir's office next to the senior living community when he accidentally stepped on the wrong pedal. The golf cart went over a 6-foot retaining wall and down an embankment until it came to rest near some bushes, several yards from a retention pond.

The senior was thrown from the cart, his body lying underneath it and head squeezed between the wheel and a small tree, Zamir said.

“I jumped down the ravine and broke the tree to free his neck,” said Zamir, 73, of Arlington Heights, who has been practicing medicine in Elgin and Huntley for 47 years.

When paramedics arrived, they ordered Zamir to stay away and called police when he didn't heed their commands.

“I wanted to try and check him to see if he broke his neck or not,” Zamir said. “At that moment, they would not let me approach him. They said I was irrational and physically blocking the paramedics from removing (the patient).”

Zamir said police forced him back, handcuffed him for “interfering” with paramedics' treatment, and put him in the back of a squad car.

“This is a very humiliating thing for a physician,” Zamir said. “I told them, 'You are arresting a physician of that patient.' They didn't care. I kept banging the car inside because the handcuffs were very tight. They let me out after the man was taken in an ambulance.”

The man was taken to a nearby hospital with two fractured ribs, a hairline fracture to the spine and other injuries. He was transferred to an Elgin nursing home.

Huntley Police Deputy Chief Michael Klunk said paramedics have their own emergency protocols and procedures.

“They felt that they were being obstructed by the physician on scene,” Klunk said. “With the conflict that was going on, we had asked the physician to separate himself. He was told to basically remove himself from the scene and stand back and, at one point, he got in front of some of the attending emergency medical services personnel. He basically just wasn't listening to them, so we were asked to step in.”

“We step in to keep the peace, and if there is anybody that is interfering with EMS or fire, there's actually laws in place for that,” Klunk said. “The fire department was going to sign complaints. It was an arrestable offense.”

Zamir's assistant made the initial 911 call to report the May 12 accident. Authorities thought it was a traffic crash when they heard a golf cart had driven into a ditch.

“The initial report didn't give any indication of any kind of injury,” Klunk said. “So that was why it was a routine response as opposed to an emergency response.”

Paramedics came to assist only after the injured man's son walked up to the fire station across the street from the doctor's office on Regency Parkway to report his father was hurt.

Zamir insists police and paramedics should have let him treat his patient and at least apologized for their treatment of him.

“The whole thing was a misjudgment of the police and of the paramedics to stop a physician,” he said. “My medical ethics law supersedes any law in the world.”