Milwaukee County Pays $1.05 Million Judgment for Bankrupt Armor Correctional Health to Former Jail Detainee
Miami-based Armor Correctional Health had virtually no experience in providing medical care to prisoners when Dr. Jose Jesus Armas started the firm in 2004, but over the next few years it amassed millions of dollars in contracts with county jails through apparent political maneuvers and promises of huge financial savings, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2006, p.29.]
Those promises turned out too good to be true. Armor racked up more debts than it could repay, much of it from settlements and judgments for inadequate medical care. That has now led to liquidation proceedings in a Miami court, from which firm founder Dr. Jose Jesus Armas currently stands to benefit, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Nov. 2024, p.51.]
Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County also got stuck with a tab that Armor owed for denying medication to a mentally ill detainee in the county jail. That $1.05 million was paid by the county on September 29, 2023, to Omar Wesley.
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at age 21, Wesley was arrested for attempted bank robbery but found not guilty by reason of his mental illness. After treatment with clozapine in a mental health facility, he was transferred to the county’s Criminal Justice Facility (CJF) to await release in April 2016. In a suit later filed on his behalf by attorneys with Gringras Thomsen & Wachs LLP in Milwaukee, the federal court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin recalled what happened next:
“Armor failed to obtain a prescription” when Wesley ran out of clozapine. Armor Dr. Maureen White admitted the firm’s “failure to enter information on a website caused the prescription for clozapine to lapse.” Wesley was released anyway and subsequently rearrested. But “unidentified Armor employees prohibited Wesley from keeping and taking his required clozapine.” While “Armor and its employees failed to provide clozapine,” the detainee “was placed in disciplinary confinement because of his mental health symptoms.” There he continued to decompensate until his medication regimen was reinstated, 65 days after it was stopped.
After this ham-handed treatment, it was no surprise when Armor lost its attorney in December 2022—he claimed he’d not been paid—and then failed to find a replacement. Since a corporation may not proceed pro se, the district court eventually entered a default judgment against Armor in January 2023. The firm finally found an attorney, who moved to vacate that judgment, but the request was denied on March 24, 2023. See: Wesley v. Armor Corr. Health Servs., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 50157 (E.D. Wis.).
After Armor filed to liquidate in September 2023, the county stepped in to pay the $1.05 million judgment to Wesley. County Attorney Margaret Daun told a local newspaper that she anticipated filing a lawsuit “to hold Armor accountable for not only their disastrously inadequate care and criminally deficient record keeping, but also for their corporate mismanagement and misrepresentations.”
Following a 2018 audit that was critical of Armor, even County board Chairman Theodore Lipscomb, Sr. worried about continuing the contract that the company had held since 2013, saying that the “whole premise of contracted medical services was that it was supposed to rectify what had been struggles with employing and keeping some of those top medical positions.”
As Lipscomb noted, “Well, that hasn’t happened.”
Additional sources: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WTMJ
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