19 May $5M Partial Settlement reached with La Plata County arising out of the gruesome death of Daniel Foard
After 6 months of depositions and litigation a partial settlement has been reached with the La Plata County Sheriff’s Department and the named Deputy Defendants relating to the claims against the County for Daniel Foard’s entirely preventable death on the floor of his cell at the La Plata County Jail (LPCJ) at the age of 32.
This settlement does not in any way resolve the continuing claims against Southern Health Partners or their medical staff for deliberate indifference.
In August, 2023, Mr. Foard was incarcerated at LPCJ on a possession charge. He was progressing through withdrawal protocols for opiates and showing some improvement, to the point of being moved to a general population cell, when he suddenly began falling down, reporting that he was experiencing sharp, excruciating and unrelenting abdominal pain, which the nurses themselves charted as ten out of ten. Rather than calling a doctor or getting Mr. Foard to the hospital, only minutes away by ambulance, SHP jail nursing staff decided to warehouse him in a booking cell, supposedly to be “medically monitored”.
However, thereafter, nursing did not take any vitals or do any other meaningful monitoring, returned Mr. Foard to a cell without treating his persisting 10 out of 10 abdominal pain, calling a doctor or transferring him to a hospital. Towards the end, Mr. Foard yelled out for his nurse as she passed by his cell, but she did not respond or even enter his cell, instead deciding she would come back to see him later. By the time she came back he had died.
Over the course of his last fifteen hours on August 16th, Mr. Foard begged SHP’s jail medical staff for help. His pleas were callously ignored, despite his inability to reliably stand or walk, his acute and agonizing pain, his profuse sweating, labored breathing, and his persistent loud retching and vomiting, including vomiting blood. Mr. Foard vomited so much, in fact, that he had to be moved to different cells so his old cells could be cleaned up. On video, Mr. Foard can be seen and heard yelling out and begging for help, asking to be taken to the hospital, saying he was going to die, reporting that he was vomiting blood which can be seen on video while exclaiming “oh my God.” But none of this was sufficient to spur any semblance of a meaningful medical response and medical staff treated him as if he was exaggerating or faking.
SHP Nurses did nothing to help Mr. Foard or obtain obviously necessary urgent medical care. He was not seen or evaluated by anyone with medical training. He was even denied requests for Gatorade and a blanket. No one from SHP did anything to save Mr. Foard by getting him to the hospital. After being deprived of the urgent medical treatment he so obviously needed, Mr. Foard died on the floor of his cell from a highly treatable perforated ulcer.
SHP has also been named as for its role in the systematic healthcare understaffing of this Jail, for permitting unqualified, untrained nurses to make medical diagnoses, for presuming inmate fakery without reporting subjective complaints of serious inmate medical needs and for routinely leaving very ill inmates in the hands on non-medically trained deputies, among a litany of other unconstitutional policies and customs. Such understaffing, and such a culture of presuming inmates are faking while unduly reducing costs, far too frequently leads to preventable tragedies like the one the Foard family must now endure.