Several of the witnesses at the jail have said that there was no evidence that the inmate had attempted to hurt himself. Though the criteria for putting an inmate in a padded room had not been met, a deputy agreed to the nurse’s request. 

When the inmate’s door in the Infirmary was opened to bring him to the padded room, he collapsed onto the floor. It took 9 minutes for deputies to pick the inmate up off of the floor. While on the way to the isolation room, the inmate again collapsed and could not walk. Deputies placed him in a wheelchair and he was taken to a padded isolation room.

The inmate was stripped of his clothing and left with two cups of water at 7:45 a.m. The jail requirement regarding isolation rooms is that staff members must do a face-to-face check every 15 minutes at most. Jail video shows that that did not happen.

A deputy assigned to monitor the inmate walked past the window twice without looking inside. Isolation rooms are equipped with cameras, but there is no evidence as to whether they checked the cameras because there is no system for tracking camera checks.

Within one hour of having placed the inmate in the isolation room, a deputy checked on him and discovered that he was not breathing and that he was cold to the touch. After another half hour, an ambulance transported the inmate to a hospital that was five miles away. At 9:51 a.m., the inmate was pronounced dead.

As mentioned earlier, the facts surrounding this inmate’s custodial death were concealed for at least nine months.

See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6 of this story plus ongoing installments to learn more about details of this man’s ultimate death plus additional information about other deaths in county jails in the state outside of Texas.

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–Guest Contributor