SEATTLE — Body-camera video from officers responding to an April 22 incident in Seattle involving Valeri Nichushkin show the Avalanche forward did not speak to police who performed an involuntary hold on an intoxicated woman found with him in his hotel room.
Nichushkin missed the last five games of the team’s first round playoff series with the Seattle Kraken after this incident. Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar only told reporters Nichushkin was away from the team for personal reasons.
Nichushkin is never seen in the two 20-minute long clips of body-camera video from the two responding officers released to 9NEWS on Thursday.
One video shows the woman, who 9NEWS has chosen not to identify because she has not been charged with a crime, strapped to a stretcher in an ambulance outside the hotel.
The woman, who tells an officer she was born in Ukraine but is from Russia, says multiple times that the person she was with took her passport and other documents and is a bad person.
“This person took my passport, everything, he put me here,” she tells the officer. When the officer asks who she is talking about, the woman never identifies anyone by name.
“You shouldn’t believe this person,” she tells the officer. “He’s crazy.”
The woman never identifies the bad person she keeps talking about.
> Watch the body camera footage below:
Another officer speaks with Avalanche team physician Bradley Changstrom, who called for EMS. Portions of the video in which Changstrom discusses Nichushkin were redacted by the Seattle Police Department, citing a provision of Washington’s open records law that protects medical and mental health information.
In the video, an off-duty Denver Police officer, Lt. Todd Fuller, who is traveling with the team as a security guard, tells the Seattle Police officer there was no crime and the situation was “more of a detox issue.” He references another team security guard who is with Nichushkin at the time.
Changstom begins talking about something that is immediately redacted. He then says, “That’s a separate issue.”
Then Changstrom begins to talk about the woman’s involvement.
“He had a girl in his room,” Changstrom tells the Seattle Police officer in the hotel lobby in the video. Audio is removed from the next portion of the conversation.
“We were trying to get her out of the room, and she was very clearly intoxicated,” Changstrom later tells the officer.
Changstrom explains that he didn’t believe the woman would be able to care for herself in that state, so he decided to call EMS rather than an Uber. He said the woman hit him in the arm outside of the hotel, but he didn’t want to press charges.
Later in the video, Changstrom tells the officer that he and other team staff members were trying to get the woman into a separate room. Then he asks the officer whether it's OK to say something confidential about Nichushkin’s medical health. The audio stops again.
In response to a request to the Colorado Avalanche for comment, the team said, "As we mentioned at the time, Val left the team for personal reasons. We have no further comment beyond that."
9NEWS has also reached out to the Seattle Police Department for a status update on any ongoing investigations into this case but has yet to receive a response.
Have a tip about this or any story? E-mail 9NEWS reporter Steve Staeger at steve@9news.com.
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