Suit Claims Arkansas Jail Authorities Deliberately Starved Larry Price to Death while He Awaited Trial. Homeless Black Man was Confined in Contaminated Solitary Cell. Couldn't Afford $1000 Bail
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From [HERE] Iris Price remembers her brother-in-law as a towering figure who despite his size was gentle and loving, especially when it came to his five nieces. Larry Price Jr., 51, was funny, kindhearted and a “big guy” — 6-foot-1 and weighing more than 185 pounds.
By the time Price died alone in a Sebastian County, Ark., jail cell in 2021, he weighed 121 pounds. Autopsy images show his emaciated body, his cheeks sunken, his collarbones and ribs protruding through his skin and his legs wasted away. The soles of his feet were swollen, white and wrinkled from standing in water in his jail cell.
Price’s relatives allege in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed Friday in an Arkansas federal court that Price, who was unhoused and lived with severe mental illness, was allowed to starve to death over a year in pretrial detention due to neglect by jail staff and its private health contractor. It names the jail, Turn Key Health Clinics and several staffers — both named and unnamed — as defendants.
An administrator with the Sebastian County Jail said in a statement Friday it had medical personnel available to treat inmates in need of care and was conducting an internal review of Price’s case. Representatives for Turn Key Health Clinics did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the complaint.
In the early morning hours of August 29, 2021, just over one year after his arrest, a corrections officer found Mr. Price in his isolation cell, lying in a pool of standing water and urine, unresponsive. He was transported to Mercy Hospital by Fort Smith EMTs, where he was pronounced dead. An autopsy performed by the Arkansas State Medical Examiner’s office found that he died from acute dehydration and malnutrition.
When Mr. Price entered the jail, he was a well-nourished, 6’2” tall man who weighed 185 pounds. When EMTs transported him to the hospital, they estimated his weight to be 90 pounds. Photographs taken on the day of his death show Mr. Price’s morbidly skeletal appearance:
There is no excuse for an atrocity like this to happen to a mentally ill man in an American jail. None. In addition to acute dehydration and malnutrition, the medical examiner observed the profoundly shrivelled (or pruned) condition of the soles of Mr. Price’s feet. The following photograph, taken at Mercy Hospital shortly after his death, depicts this shocking observation:
Mr. Price’s grotesquely wilted skin was caused by “prolonged moisture exposure” from the pool of contaminated water on the concrete floor and bunk of his solitary confinement cell. The United States Constitution has long prohibited inhumane conditions of confinement like this. In addition to being cruel and unusual, it was also hazardous. In fact, because of the pooled water in Mr. Price’s cell, the jail’s first responding officers opted not to use the readily available electronic defibrillator, which might have saved Mr. Price’s life.
Larry Price suffered in the tortured throes of his untreated mental disorder for months on end as jail healthcare and security staff watched him waste away—apathetic to his lifethreatening medical and mental health needs and to the cruelty of his confinement. He died not only because of their deliberate indifference and neglect, but also because of systemic deficiencies in the Sebastian County Jail’s policies and practices, which put severely mentally ill people at significant risk of serious harm or death. The constitution mandates better treatment of society’s most vulnerable citizens.
Mr. Price’s estate brings this federal civil rights action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to redress the violation of his constitutional rights and to hold the defendants accountable for his unnecessary pain and suffering, the loss of his life, and the grief and anguish of his surviving family members.
To Price’s family, his death is especially painful because of how easily it could have been avoided — starting with the decision to put a man with schizophrenia into a system that was never designed to treat him and then holding him without trial for a year over the $100 bail he couldn’t afford. The pain is compounded, they say, by details like the dozens of prison logs that suggest either no one was watching or no one cared as he wasted away, the logs that continued to list him as “OK” — even after he had died.
The family’s attorney, Erik Heipt, whose Seattle-based practice Budge and Heipt specializes in wrongful death and police brutality, called Price’s death one of the worst he’d seen in almost 20 years of handling these cases. [MORE]
