10 days of hell in Sacramento jail: Lawsuit says inmate died after pleas for help ignored
Norman Fisher Jr. had been in the Sacramento County Main Jail for three months when he became ill last May, vomiting nonstop and unable to eat or drink.
“He could barely sit up in his bed, and when he did so, he would vomit,” court papers say.
Even after his cellmate, Jacob Smith, alerted jail custody staff that Fisher needed help the pleas were ignored, with one staffer telling Smith that if Fisher needed help he would have to fill out a form himself and ask for it, court papers say.
Over the course of 10 days, as Fisher’s condition deteriorated to the point that he could not stand up long enough to use the toilet, court papers say Fisher and Smith were reprimanded for using the cell’s emergency button asking for help; a doctor who diagnosed Fisher with a high fever, chills and soreness advised him to let his illness “run its course;” and a medical assistant reported Fisher “refused” to come out of his cell for a blood pressure check when he actually was too sick to get up to leave the cell.
By May 22, Fisher was so ill that Smith asked for help from custody staff and refused to lock down his cell unless Fisher received help, a demand that led to Fisher being transferred to a medical department for observation and a diagnosis the next day by a doctor who said his “condition has declined” and that he needed to be sent to emergency, court papers say.
Fisher ultimately was sent to Sutter Medical Center, where he was placed on life support and died May 27 from septic shock, pneumonia and acute kidney failure, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed Monday by Fisher’s family against Sheriff Jim Cooper, the county and Maxim Healthcare Services.
“What can you say? He was just horribly ignored when it was obvious he needed serious medical attention,” said Sacramento attorney Mark Merin, who filed the wrongful death suit seeking more than $10 million in damages. “It boggles the mind that he wouldn’t have been attended to.
“It was clear he had something seriously wrong with him.”
The lawsuit cites a number of other instances in which inmates at the jail have died, allegedly from inadequate care and diagnosis of their maladies, and accuses jail staff of deliberate indifference to inmates’ constitutionally guaranteed rights to adequate medical care.
“This is the epitome of deliberate indifference,” Merin said. “The constitutional requirements are pretty onerous; you have to really show that they were deliberately indifferent to a serious medical condition.
“And this is certainly that.”
Merin noted that despite other instances of inmate deaths and allegations that medical care inside the jail is substandard, health care in the I Street lockup is “despicably poor.”
“Despite years of evidence of the inadequacies in the medical treatment provided at the jail, it has only gotten worse,” Merin said. “Norman could easily have been saved had he gotten the most basic of attention; antibiotics would have cured the sepsis, a blood infection.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office declined Tuesday to comment on pending litigation. The county and Maxim Healthcare did not immediately provide comment on the suit Tuesday.
But Sheriff Cooper has previously called jail medical staff “inept” and asked for an overhaul of the jail’s medical unit that would place it under his control rather than the county’s.
The Fisher lawsuit accuses the Sheriff’s Office of failing to report some in-custody deaths and cites numerous cases where jail staff have allegedly failed to respond to inmates’ medical needs, including:
▪ The Aug. 4, 2020, death of inmate Travis Welde, who was classified as “fit for incarceration” despite a urine test that resulted in positive findings for amphetamines, methamphetamine, opiates and other substances, as well as erratic behavior that included him talking nonsensically and smearing feces on himself. Welde was found face down and naked in his cell and not breathing after being ignored by jail staff, the suit says.
▪ The June 11, 2019, death of Andrew Armstead who overdosed at the jail and died of methamphetamine intoxication, the suit says.
▪ The Feb. 15, 2022, death of Anthony Galley from a seizure caused by severe alcohol withdrawal, the suit says. A separate suit filed on behalf of Galley’s family alleges the inmate consumed a gallon of liquor a day and that jail staff failed to provide withdrawal treatment for him.
The jail has operated under a federal consent decree since 2018 designed to improve health care inside the facility, but a report in October 2022 by monitors found access to health care in the jail “broken” and decried filthy conditions and callous treatment of inmates.
