Dennis Sachet was 5 feet 4, 124 pounds, and by his own admission, in the wrong. He said as much, standing in his driveway in a plastic yard chair, extending his palm to the sheriff’s deputy who had just handcuffed him.
“I apologize, buddy,” he said.
“I get it, it’s nothing personal,” the deputy, James “David” Young of the Benton County Sheriff’s Office, replied, shaking his hand.
Thirteen days later, Sachet was dead, found on his living room floor by his caregiver. Now his family is suing Young and the sheriff’s office for $3.85 million, arguing that the deputy’s takedown — not old age, not underlying illness — broke Sachet’s ribs, punctured his lung, and ultimately suffocated him. An Oregon Medical Examiner’s report seems to concur.
It began, as these things sometimes do in small towns, with a phone call about smoke. A neighbor in Alsea, a community of roughly 200 people about half an hour southwest of Corvallis, had reported that Sachet was violating a summer burn ban. In fact, according to the lawsuit, he was only reheating leftover meat from a restaurant in a metal fire pit — hardly the stuff of infernos.
Two young firefighters from the Oregon Department of Forestry showed up first, and the visit did not go well. One of them, 23 years old, told Young that Sachet had shoved him and ordered him off the property, threatening to shoot if anyone came back. “He just gave me a shove and was like, ‘Get out of here,'” recounted the firefighter to the deputy. “And I wasn’t going to fight, so I got back in the rig.”
By the time Young pulled into Sachet’s gravel driveway that evening, the encounter had already curdled into confrontation before a word was exchanged. Body-camera footage shows Sachet approaching with his hands raised at waist height, telling the deputy, “Don’t come any further!” Young grabbed him by the wrists, spun him around, pushed him into his own car, and brought him to the ground, rolling him onto his stomach as Sachet resisted the instruction to do so.
“You’re not going to threaten me, come up to me and try to put hands on me,” Young told him.
What followed, according to the footage and the lawsuit, was a man in visible distress. Sachet complained his back hurt. He mentioned a catheter in his chest and worried aloud that it was bleeding. He begged for his hands back.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, owwww!” he said. “Please give me my hands.”
A medic who responded noted that Sachet’s blood pressure was climbing even as he sat still. He declined a trip to the hospital that night, citing the cost, though he went the next day to get checked out. In total, the cuffs stayed on for about 34 minutes.
The lawsuit, filed Aug. 27 in Benton County Circuit Court, contends that Young’s own police report doesn’t hold up against his own video. The deputy wrote that Sachet had grabbed at the pouches on his belt while pushing against him — a claim the family’s attorney, Austin Neff, told the Oregonian the footage simply does not support. Neff also disputes that Sachet was violating the burn ban at all; in the body-camera video, a medic wearing an Alsea Fire & Rescue T-shirt tells Sachet as much, noting that all he needed to do was let the forestry crew take a look. “They would have come on and said, ‘You’re good,'” the medic said. “They would not have put that out.”
There is some humanity threaded through the chaos and violence of the video, an old man’s small talk amid his own undoing. Walking gingerly afterward with a stick, a bloodied bandage wrapped around his forearm, Sachet told the deputy he was finished with barbecuing for good.
“I’m going to quit eating steak,” he said.
“Steak’s the best,” Young answered, almost sweetly.
“I have to barbecue it,” Sachet said. “I’m not going to barbecue anymore.”
Young cited Sachet with two counts of misdemeanor harassment, defined as offensive physical contact by Oregon law — one count for the firefighter, one for himself — and told him he’d need to appear in court about a month later. Sachet never made it.
Public records show no complaints or investigations were ever opened into Young, who joined the department as a reserve deputy in 2017 and was promoted the following year. The sheriff’s office, also named as a defendant, has declined press requests for comment, citing the pending litigation.
Sachet is survived by two adult children, a daughter and a son, both living in Arizona.
Neff, speaking to the Oregonian, said, “The lawsuit seeks justice and a public recognition that elderly and medically fragile people must not be met with unnecessary violence by law enforcement.”
Reporter Aimee Green of The Oregonian put narration to the deputy’s body camera footage that is fair and definitive. It is also hard watch, click here if you would like to see the video.
To contact Chris Evenson about this story, email office@corvallisadvocate.com.
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