Hypo behind the wheel

There it was. On the front page of the Sunday Star-Ledger. An all-too-familiar headline:

The article continued on Page 4.  And on Page 5. Clearly, this was a big story. And it’s a story we’ve heard before. A man is found in his car slumped over steering wheel. When confronted by police, he responds incoherently. Police beat the man into oblivion. Medics arrive and check his blood sugar: 26 mg/dL.

I don’t need to tell the story, you’ve probably heard it before. Perhaps you’ve lived it, though I pray to God that you haven’t and that you never will. This man, ironically, had developed a training program for the Philadelphia Police Department on spotting and handling the symptoms of hypoglycemia a few years earlier, but the New Jersey State Police, who were on the scene at this particular time, had never had such a program.