Post by ck4829 on Oct 29, 2016 11:22:50 GMT
Kelly Green was off the medication he needed for his schizophrenia and was talking about killing himself. Alarmed by the homeless man’s erratic behavior on a cold Oregon night in February 2013, a convenience store clerk called the police.
When the Eugene police arrived, they arrested Green, 28, on an outstanding warrant related to a misdemeanor incident two months earlier.
At the Lane County Jail, Green cursed and talked to inanimate objects. A booking deputy wrote in her notes: “May be bipolar/schizophrenic. No meds … talks to himself … not making sense.” Although the prison health care giant Corizon Health Inc. had a contract to provide health screening and medical care at the jail, no one from the on-site Corizon staff made any effort to see Green or talk to him.
Green was placed in a cell by himself. He wasn’t provided with any psychiatric treatment.
The next morning, he snapped. During his arraignment inside a courtroom at the jail, a judge told him he would be detained for a couple of days. Green suddenly sprinted 10 feet toward a partition of concrete blocks, his head lowered. As skull met concrete, it sounded like “throwing a watermelon at the wall,” one observer later remarked.
Though he suffered a catastrophic injury, later determined to be a “burst fracture” of the C-4 vertebra in his neck, Corizon employees chose not to send Green immediately to a hospital. Instead, court records show, they suggested that he be dropped off at the hospital after he was released from jail. In the meantime, he was humiliated and taunted by jail staffers as his condition grew progressively worse.
“If he had gone to the hospital before being released, Corizon would have had to pay the hospital bill,” said Elden Rosenthal, a Portland lawyer who represented Green’s family in a lawsuit against Corizon. “They had this system. There was something called a ‘courtesy drop.’ The physician’s assistant was thinking, ‘We’ll release this guy and then have the Lane County officers take him to the hospital.’”
It was almost seven hours before Green was transported to the hospital. By then, it was too late. He lost the use of his arms and legs, and was placed on a ventilator. He died from complications six months later. A medical expert for Green’s family said he would have been saved with timely intervention.