Bronx woman sues Westchester County over son's suicide after transfer to federal jail
The mother of a 22-year-old Bronx man who died by suicide hours after being transferred into federal custody is seeking to hold Westchester County officials responsible for her son's death.
In a federal lawsuit filed last week against Westchester and the county jail's medical personnel, Liza Pizarro says jail officials transferred her son, Daruis, to a federal detention center without warning of his rapidly declining mental state.
Because adequate warning was not provided on his transfer paperwork, Pizarro alleges, federal officials immediately deposited Daruis into an unguarded cell wearing a T-shirt, which he would use to hang himself soon thereafter.
"There was red flags, they ignored everything," Pizarro recalled through tears in an interview. "Nobody should have to go through that. No mother should get a phone call like that. It could have been prevented. But that's the system. It's built to fail."
Daruis Pizarro had been booked into the county jail in August 2022 as he was awaiting trial in federal court on armed robbery charges.
A spokesperson for Westchester County declined to comment. A spokesperson for Wellpath, the private company that furnishes healthcare services at the jail, did not respond to a request for comment. And a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, only provided The Journal News/lohud with an old press release announcing Daruis Pizarro's death on Oct. 19, 2022.
In her lawsuit, Pizarro recounts her son's longstanding mental health struggles, highlighting that his stay at the Westchester County jail was turbulent from the get-go. After his intake assessment, Daruis was briefly placed on suicide watch, the lawsuit states.
Daruis told evaluators he had been previously committed to a psychiatric facility and that he had made a suicide attempt. And on the same day he was admitted into the county jail, an official categorized him as "Mental Health 1: Crisis-level mental disorder," according to the lawsuit.
At various points during his incarceration, officials grappled with how to provide him with appropriate treatment, according to the lawsuit and supporting documents. Though one official diagnosed Daruis with an "unspecified mood disorder" two weeks after he began his detention, he soon began "exhibiting signs of psychosis," the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit points to multiple instances where Daruis appeared to be decompensating or losing touch with reality, including one instance where he was "repeatedly heard to be rambling" and "exhibiting delusional behavior."
Pizarro traces her son's struggles with mental health to the 2020 death of his brother Julian Oden at the age of 25.
"I just saw a change when he started grieving for his brother," she said. "He lost his big brother, his best friend and confidant."
According to his family, Daruis was not the man officials made him out to be when they accused him of robbing an Insomnia Cookies establishment at gunpoint.
His sister, Ameera Bing, recalls how Daruis wrote poems and music growing up and desired to become an engineer. She said that many of his teachers showed up to his funeral, remembering him from years earlier. Bing emphasized how her own son looked up to and admired his uncle Daruis.
"My son wanted to be just like him," Bing said. "He took such great care of my son, especially during the pandemic, when childcare was an issue for me."
But at the jail, Daruis' mental health challenges, exacerbated by his incarceration, caused him to spiral, the lawsuit says. Officials apparently recognized his dire psychiatric state. In an email exchange leading up to Daruis' transfer into federal custody, a Wellpath official who was identified as the county jail system's mental health director asked, "Is there a means of returning him to the Feds so they can provide the higher level of care that he needs?"
This same official also wrote an email stating that Daruis is "psychotic and behaviorally dysregulated in the context of refusing voluntary psychiatric treatment."
But when county officials were eventually able to send Daruis into federal custody, the lawsuit alleges they severely under-reported the nature of his psychiatric condition, beginning the chain of events that would lead to his death.
When an inmate is transferred to someone else's custody, Westchester County provides the receiving agency with forms outlining the individual's mental health condition. According to the lawsuit, Westchester personnel "failed to complete" one such special precaution form.
A 2018 version of the special precaution form included checkboxes allowing officials to indicate whether an inmate had injured, or attempted to injure, himself. There was also a catch-all checkbox labeled "other," where officials could expound on any known hazards.
The only immediate medical information about Daruis that was available to federal officials during his transfer was a custodial transfer form, according to the lawsuit.
"The form was riddled with errors and... included only two outdated, inaccurate, and incomplete medical records that obscured his psychiatric condition and risk of suicide," the lawsuit states.
On Daruis' custodial transfer form, there is a checkbox for inmates experiencing “Suicide watch/psychiatric decompensation within past month.” That box was not checked.
Further, under a header labeled "OTHER MEDICAL PROBLEMS," officials wrote that there were none.
"Essentially you have somebody who shows up at the next place with no medical records and with no forms or other information, so of course they put him in a regular cell," commented Katherine Rosenfeld, an attorney with Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, which is representing Liza Pizarro.
According to the lawsuit, Daruis was placed alone in an unguarded cell after his transfer, using the T-shirt provided to him to hang himself.
"This is not someone you just shove in a van with a piece of paper," Rosenfeld added. "It’s a very preventable death, and it’s, therefore, I think even more tragic."
Asher Stockler is a reporter for The Journal News and the USA Today Network New York. You can send him an email at astockler@lohud.com. Reach him securely: asher.stockler@protonmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Westchester County NY lawsuit by Bronx man's mother for jail suicide
