An Alabama man has had to endure a series of painful operation, culminating in the amputation of his left hand, after he developed muscular and nerve damage from a Birmingham police officer handcuffing him too tightly during a February 2020 arrest, the Washington Post reports.

According to his lawsuit, Giovanni Loyola, 26, was watching television at his mother’s home when sheriff’s deputies, responding to a call of a fight between two men holding “large weapons,” knocked on the door of his home in a Birmingham trailer park.  Although Loyola said he hadn’t heard any disturbance, the officers demanded that Loyola step out of the house so they could search it, but Loyola refused.  Deputies pulled him from the house and threw him against a police car, handcuffing him.  Loyola immediately told the deputies that the cuffs were too tight, but they ignored him and put him on the ground, with one deputy, identified as Deputy Godber, occasionally kneeling on his back.

The deputies made Loyola’s mother exit the house as they searched it for 45 minutes, although they did not present a search warrant, all with Loyola laying on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back, as he started losing the feeling in his hand.

Deputies charged Loyola with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, and kept him handcuffed in a cell for hours, despite repeated complaining about the pain in his arm and asking deputies to loosen the cuffs.  The deputies finally removed the cuffs after a number of hours and refused Loyola’s request for medical attention.  He ended up spending twelve days in jail for outstanding traffic warrants.

With his fingers turning black and blue, Loyola went to an area hospital after his release.  There, he had two fingertips amputated, but the pain and discoloration continued, causing him to undergo a series of operations, culminating with doctors amputating his left hand to stop the spread of an infection.

Loyola, who had worked in construction prior to his arrest, now cannot work and has sunk into a depression, rarely leaving his home, his lawyers say.  He’s filed a federal civil rights complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama last month against the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department.

Typical police handcuffs use a ratchet system to tighten the cuffs, which also have a pin officers must depress to lock the ratchet in place, preventing them from further tightening.  Officers frequently apply the cuffs too tightly, which they can loosen by releasing the detainee and reapplying the cuff.

But when the officer neglects to depress the locking pin, the cuffs can tighten when the detainee’s wrist is bumped or jostled–and in some cases, the cuffs can tighten as the detainee moves their wrists.