A 27-year-old woman with a history of seizures after withdrawals from drugs did not receive medical care while she was being held in a Nevada county jail last year, where she died three days into her stay. Her family has now filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Mineral County Sheriff’s Office.
The woman, Kelly Coltrain, who was living in Texas, was visiting the area for a family reunion to celebrate her grandmother’s 75th birthday, according to WUSA9. After the reunion, she was pulled over and put in jail for failing to pay parking tickets.
This week, state investigators released a report, which found that jail staff violated policies by refusing her proper medical care when she told them about her drug dependency and seizures during withdrawals four hours into her stay. After a knee injury in her teens, Coltrain experienced depression and a drug addiction, which is why she requested medical help, anticipating the experience of withdrawal in jail.
According to the report, Deputy Ray Gulcynski told her, “I’m not going to take you over to the hospital right now just to get your fix … That’s not the way detention works, unfortunately. You are incarcerated with us, so … you don’t get to go to the hospital when you want. When we feel that your life is at risk… then you will go.”
During the third day of her stay in jail, Coltrain was vomiting and shaking. Sgt. Jim Holland told Coltrain to clean her vomit off the floor. She did so while sitting in in bed. The report said, “Sgt. Holland advised he thought Coltrain was just ‘lazy’ and that she just didn’t want to stand up to clean the floor … Sgt. Holland advised he just wanted the floor to be cleaned and he didn’t care how it got done, just that it got cleaned up.”
According to WUSA9, this was the last time anyone saw her alive, and she died less than an hour later. The video monitor of her cell shows she stopped moving at about 6:30 p.m. and was discovered at 12:30 a.m. when Deputy Ray Gulcynski looked at her, touched her arm and then went to tell supervisors. No one called paramedics, according to the report. He checked for a pulse and left the cell. Her body was left there until nearly 6 a.m. when the Washoe County forensic technician came to the jail. The examiner found that there was heroin in her system when she died and that her death was due to complications of drug use.
The lawsuit says that the sheriff’s office ignored her medical condition, which was life-threatening. The family’s lawyers, Terri Keyser-Cooper and Kerry Doyle, wrote in the lawsuit, “(Jail staff) knew Kelly Coltrain had lain for days at the jail, in bed, buried beneath blankets, vomiting multiple times, refusing meals, trembling, shaking, and rarely moving. Defendants knew Kelly Coltrain was in medical distress.”
Both men reportedly received discipline after the incident and Holland was offered a buyout, which he took. When considering whether the jailers should face criminal charges, Stephen B. Rye, told WUSA9 “it did not appear that they exhibited any cruel, oppressive or malicious treatment” based on the Nevada Investigation Division report.
It isn’t incredibly uncommon for people to die in jail due to complications from withdrawal. According to a Mother Jones report published last year, 20 lawsuits were filed between 2014 and 2016 that claimed an inmate died because of opiate withdrawal complications.
The 2014 death of David Stojcevski is similar to the story of Coltrain. Stojcevski’s experience in jail was caught on camera, as he lost 50 pounds and experienced seizures during his 17-day stay in a Macomb County, Michigan jail. He was picked by authorities because he didn’t pay a $772 traffic ticket. Even though a nurse evaluated him and suggested he be placed in a drug detox unit, he was put in a jail cell and then a mental health cell, according to Vox. And even though he wouldn’t eat for 48 hours and shook on the floor, attention to his condition arrived too late to actually help him. His family brought a federal lawsuit against the county sheriff’s office. In 2016, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
In 2015, a teenager named Victoria “Tori” Herr died after going through withdrawal in a Pennsylvania jail after she was arrested on drug charges. She requested medical care — she experienced hallucinations — but was reportedly denied it when jailers claimed she was faking a medical emergency. Inmates said she was denied when she asked for something to drink and she was denied any medical treatment for days. She had to collapse in her cell before she was finally taken to the hospital. She died five days later.
In cases such as Stojcevski and Coltrain’s deaths, there’s a question of whether they should have been a priority for law enforcement at all, simply because they failed to pay parking tickets. Critics of this practice point out that this is a practice that targets low-income people and people of color. One report released from the ACLU this year shows that people are now also being jailed for civil debts such as past-due utility bills.
Regardless of why someone is being held in jail, there is no reason jail should be a death sentence for a person experiencing drug addiction. Even when people survive the experience of being jailed without medication, they are in greater danger of overdosing and dying once they leave. Recent research shows that opioid overdose deaths of recently incarcerated people fell by nearly two thirds when a new program screened them and gave them addiction medicines.