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Prison workers ignore dying inmate's calls for help in harrowing video from Oklahoma jail
The Independent
February 10, 2020
Area: Joplin, Pittsburg
Surveillance video from inside an Oklahoma jail shows staff ignoring a man pleading for his life in the moments before he died from sepsis and pneumonia two weeks after he turned himself in.
Newly released footage from inside Ottawa County Jail shows the staff telling Terral Ellis Jr "if you can't breath, how can you talk?" and "I'm sick and tired of f****** dealing with your ass" while he repeatedly calls for help hours before his death in 2015.
This week, a federal judge will determine whether to advance a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Ellis family that charges that the sheriff's office and the five jail staffers and nurses are responsible for Mr Ellis' death.
According to the lawsuit, his health suddenly declined in the days after he was admitted into the jail after turning himself in following a warrant for a DUI.
The lawsuit says he had "exhibited a serious medical need" and complained to staff that he was experiencing seizures, convulsions, uncontrollable sweating, body pain and dehydration and wasn't able to walk, "symptoms of an emergent and life-threatening condition, requiring immediate hospital-level care".
Jail staff "disregarded the obvious, known and substantial risks to Mr Ellis' health by failing to send him to a hospital or otherwise provide appropriate care treatment or evaluation".
Another inmate had to hand feed and water him as well as "give him cups to urinate in and then dump them out for him", according to the suit.
Before his death, Mr Ellis and another inmate begged detention staff for help but he was to to "stop faking it" and that there was nothing they could do, the suit says. Mr. Ellis reportedly asked, "What are you going to tell my two-year-old child when I die in here?"
According to the suit, while Mr Ellis was experiencing a seizure, detention officers entered his cell and snapped ammonia sticks under his nose until the seizure ended, "then detention officers left as if nothing had happened. They provided no medical care. They did not call a doctor or nurse. They did not call an ambulance. They were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs."
The suit alleges that staff told Mr Ellis he was "faking" his illness and that the county was not going to "foot the bill" for his hospital care.
On 22 October 2015, an ambulance removed Mr Ellis from the jail and took him to a local hospital. He died less than an hour later.
The lawsuit alleges that the jail staff placed a sheet around Mr Ellis' neck "in an apparent attempt to portray his death as a suicide and to cover up the deliberate indifference to his serious and obvious medical needs" after a medical examiner determined that there were no neck injuries involved with his illness.
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