Family Attorney Talks About John Lucas’ Death By Ambulance

On April 16, John Lucas was run over by an ambulance from the Kanawha County Emergency Ambulance Authority at 2 a.m. in Elkview. Then the ambulance driver and another EMT dragged him for nearly two miles. Lucas died from his injuries.  

News Director Eric Douglas spoke with the family’s attorney, Scott Summers.  

This interview has been edited for clarity.  

Douglas: Let’s just start with how’s the family doing? What’s going on with the Lucas family? 

Summers: As every day passes, it’s a roller coaster for them. They’re up and down. They have their good — well, I can’t say they have good moments, because I don’t think they are having any good moments. They have better moments. They have horrible low moments, and they are coping the best way they know how.  

John, despite what was put out there, John was a really good guy. I’ve known the family for 30 years. I’ve known John since he was a teenager. And they are suffering a grievous loss, and that’s kind of getting lost in the noise of everything that’s going on.  

There’s been an incredible outpouring of the community that has meant so much to this family. There were 1700+ people at the funeral. Maybe the next day, even, but certainly in a very short period of time, people reached out and wanted to have a vigil for him. There’s just been such an outpouring of love to this family, and that really helps. They’re doing better. They’ve been upset for reasons, and then they’re upset for other reasons, and they’ve been mad for reasons and they’re mad for other reasons. And frankly, I don’t think they’ve had an opportunity to grieve at this point. 

Douglas: This is an awful event. But as is typical in any of these sorts of events the whole truth doesn’t come out immediately and that that leads to a lot of wild speculation and conspiracy theories. Tell me about that and what it’s meant to the family. 

Summers: Congratulations, you win the award for understatement of the day. That has been really, really hard on the family, because up to yesterday, we had no idea what had happened. I understand people’s hunger for information. I understand, especially in today’s society, wanting to be the person that comes out with the smoking gun, per se, but that has been, I think, so detrimental to the family’s grief process that it has absolutely had a negative impact.  

For instance there has been reports that the women in the ambulance can be heard to say, after they run over John, “We’ve just done the community a favor.” And that they were laughing about it. There’s just been so many things that are just absolute and complete falsehoods, and for the family to hear that, they’re already grieving, they’re already blaming — and rightfully so — the occupants of this ambulance for the death of their beloved John, and then they’re hearing everything that’s on top of that. So it has been terrible, and the fact that there hasn’t been any way to counter any of that has been just extremely painful. 

Douglas: You just had a meeting with the Kanawha County prosecuting attorney, Debra Rusnak. Tell me about that meeting.  

Summers: I want to say this first, when David Lucas called me the morning John was killed, his request of me was, “Please help me find out what happened.” He just wanted information, that was it, because the story that was put out we all knew was not accurate. So, the family was very upset that it didn’t look like anything was getting done. And what people don’t understand, the prosecutor and law enforcement are in a really tough spot. I have no doubt that Debra Rusnak would have liked nothing more than to bring her evidence out on the street and the sidewalk on Virginia Street, and say, “Here it is. Look at all the work I’ve done.” But she cannot do that. And it’s that that caused the problem in that the family, me, the general public. We thought that there was this horrendous incident that basically was being swept under the rug. And Mr. Lucas said it best at one point, they all thought that this was just a homeless guy that nobody cared about. And man, were they wrong. So that’s the impression. 

So Debra Rusnak, to her credit, what she has done for this family is essentially, I won’t say, unprecedented, but extremely rare, extremely rare. She brought the family in, and the family put her to the test. I mean, they pulled no punches. They were direct. They were demanding answers, and it was a very tense situation in the beginning of that meeting. But Debra Rusnak did what she promised she would do. She laid out whatever evidence, I won’t say, whatever they wanted to see, because there were certain things, she said, “I’m just not going to show you, because I don’t think you need to see it,” such as photos and those kinds of things, but we watched all the videos. There’s dash cam video pointing forward from the ambulance that doesn’t have audio. There is a recording into the cabin of the ambulance that has both video and audio. She showed us all of that and walked through things, and at the end of that meeting, the atmosphere and the attitudes were a 180-degree difference from what it was when we went in there.  

It is clear that Debra Rusnak and the sheriff’s department have been busting their hind ends to work this case.  

What I’ve said from the very beginning is I’m not going to engage in conjecture or speculation. I’m only going to say the facts as I know them to exist, and I can tell you based on what I’ve seen, they have been doing their job all along. Originally, when the prosecutor reached out to Mr. Lucas, she had 251 or 261 pieces of evidence. Yesterday, it was up to 400 pieces of evidence.  

David Lucas went to Debra Rusnak and said, “I owe you an apology. I’ve misjudged you, and I have not believed what has happened, and I was wrong, and I apologize.” 

Later on that evening, another one of the family members, basically on Facebook said the same thing.  

It’s okay to criticize elected officials. I mean, that’s part of the job. It comes with the territory. But a lot of what’s been thrown at these folks is frankly, kind of unfair, especially now that we know, I’ve kind of said to multiple people, now we know exactly what happened. We may never know why, but we know exactly what happened.  

I am convinced that the prosecutor’s office and the sheriff’s department are investigating this case and will pursue this case and assess criminal culpability to whoever the person is that they deem as culpable, without regard to whoever that person may or may not be related to. 

Douglas: You’ve known John since he was a teenager. Tell me a little about who John was, as you knew him. 

Summers: When John was 16, he was involved in an accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury. And David Lucas, John’s dad, said it best, John was essentially a 16-year-old boy trapped in a 45-year-old man’s body. He was just a mischievous boy, and John probably didn’t live his life the way his family wanted him to live his life. The rumor out there that he was homeless and the family never helped him is far from the truth. John had an apartment, and they kept an apartment, but John would prefer to sleep on the bench at the community center or sleep under a bridge sometimes. He wanted the freedom. John did some mischievous things. Laura, his sister said it best. “Not many of us are going to be able to say what John is saying in heaven right now, ‘I lived my life the way I wanted to live my life,’ and John lived the life that John wanted to live.” 

The misconception out there is John was some evil, crazy guy that chased these women. Not the case. John was loved by this community. There were 1700+ people that showed up at his services.  

The community knew him. The community watched out for him. Was he mischievous? Absolutely. Did John have run-ins with law enforcement every now and then? Absolutely. Was John perfect? Absolutely not. Was John an evil man capable of chasing women with a knife? That’s ultimately going to be up for some jury. Based on my knowledge, based on what we’ve heard, an outpouring in the community, absolutely not, absolutely not. And I want to say one other thing to that in watching the video, and now I’ve seen it twice, 35 minutes long. In watching the video, at no time does John Lucas chase anyone with a knife. Period. Didn’t happen. Simply did not happen. When John Lucas was struck by that ambulance, John Lucas did not have a knife, period.