Phlebotomist Ian Sedigh, Accused of Drawing Blood From Suspect's Neck, Is Fired

​The San Francisco police-contracted phlebotomist who purportedly drew blood from a DUI suspect's neck and told his employer he didn't has been fired, according to deputy public defender Prithika Balakrishnan. A supervisor from Arcadia Health Care, the company that contracts with the San Francisco Police Department to draw blood from DUI suspects, testified that he fired Ian Sedigh on May 5 for falsifying documents. 

But it wasn't before one last courtroom showdown with Sedigh, who's picked up a reputation among defense attorneys as a "whack job" on the stand. We wrote before about how Sedigh was declared "unavailable" as a witness after he claimed he was "covered in feces" when he arrived at the courthouse in April. That case is still on appeal on grounds of whether soiling yourself is actually "unavailable."

But Balakrishnan got a chance to cross-examine Sedigh in another DUI trial on May 18. During direct examination from Assistant District Attorney Nicholas Jay, Sedigh made no mention of the fact he'd been laid off two weeks earlier.

When asked his occupation, he answered, "My occupation is a phlebotomist." The prosecutor then asked how long he'd been one, and he said, "I've been a phlebotomist for four years."

"The district attorney did not tell us," Balakrishnan said. "They said they did not know. Here he is, sitting on the stand, testifying to his qualifications as a phlebotomist, and never reveals he was fired two weeks ago."

During cross examination, Sedigh denied several times that he had taken blood from a suspect's neck in a previous case, a potentially life-threatening maneuver that prompted another defense attorney to write a letter of complaint to Arcadia and the state department of health.

Balakrishnan didn't learn about Sedigh's firing until she called his supervisor at Arcadia, Ariel Asilo. Asilo then testified in the May trial that he had fired Sedigh for falsifying casework documents in the previous neck-draw case, writing that he had instead taken the blood from the suspect's left arm. (An Arcadia employee told SF Weekly Asilo was off on Friday, and could not be reached for comment.)

When we originally wrote about this in April, Asilo said Sedigh had informed him it was actually a General Hospital nurse who did the neck draw. Officer Crispin Jones of the San Francisco Police Department then testified in the May case that Sedigh, indeed, had done the neck draw, as Jones had originally written in the police report.

The May DUI case in which all this happened, by the way, was the same one in which prosecutors disclosed that a Washington state court had called San Francisco medical examiner toxicologist Ann Marie Gordon a "perpetrator of fraud" while she ran that state's toxicology lab.

With Sedigh as the phlebotomist and Gordon as the toxicologist in the prosecution's corner, Balakrishnan says the jury deliberated for 40 minutes before finding the suspect not guilty.