Suits Filed Over Dehydration Deaths at Two Texas Jails
by Matt Clarke
On July 9, 2024, the grandmother of a mentally ill detainee who died of dehydration at Texas’ Denton County Jail (DCJ) filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, accusing jail staff of deliberate indifference in allowing Heath Aaron Vandeventer to suffer severe dehydration and malnutrition before he perished just two months after his arrest.
Vandeventer, 27, was residing with his grandmother, Lanette Silvey, at her in Argyle home when she called 911 to report that he was experiencing a mental health crisis. Law enforcement officers arrested him for assault against an elderly person and booked him into DCJ on July 7, 2023.
According to court documents, jail staff was made aware during booking—as well as in multiple phone calls from Silvey—that Vandeventer had a history of mental illness, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and suicidal ideation. His mental illness rendered him incapable of signing booking documents. Jailers also knew that he had been involuntarily committed for inpatient treatment multiple times and treated by Denton County Mental Health and Mental Retardation (MHMR).
Nevertheless, they placed him in a “single cell,” a 6’ x 12’ isolation cell with 24/7 lighting. There he remained until his lifeless corpse was removed on September 13, 2023. According to the complaint, he had lost 105 pounds during that time; the official cause of death was listed as dehydration with malnutrition as a contributing cause.
Denton attorneys Chris Raesz, Sarah Roland and George Roland assisted Silvey in filing a 42 U.S.C. § 1983complaint against the county, Sheriff Tracy Murphee, Public Health Administrator Barry Carver and various jail personnel. See: Silvey v. Denton Cty., USDC (E.D. Tex.), Case No. 4:24-cv-00627.
More Dehydration Deaths
in Fort Worth
Just 35 miles away, at Tarrant County’s Lon Evans Correction Center in Fort Worth, three more mentally ill pretrial detainees died of complications caused by dehydration in a 20-month span from June 2020 until February 2022.
The first, Abdullahi Mohamed, was arrested for allegedly threatening a relative with a knife and booked into the jail in June 2020. He had a history of serious mental illness, including bipolar disorder, and had spent time in a state mental hospital; he was also manic at the time of his arrest. Nine days later, on June 25, 2020, jailers collected his nude body from his cell floor and took him for medical evaluation in a wheelchair, where he urinated on himself and died. The cause of death was dehydration, though he had access to water in his cell.
Then in April 2021, Georgia Baldwin telephoned Arlington police and left bizarre messages containing profanity and indications that she wanted someone to die, stating that “[t]he Governor of Mississippi needs to blow you away.” An Arlington police detective discovered that Baldwin’s address on her driver’s license was the address of a homeless shelter. Reports of previous encounters with police indicated that she was “not mentally sound and/or coherent.” The detective concluded that Baldwin had a mental health disorder. Nonetheless, she was arrested for making terroristic threats to a peace officer and booked into the jail.
A psychiatric examination was scheduled for the next month and a “no bond” order issued pending its outcome. Baldwin was found incompetent to stand trial, and the court ordered her incarceration for a “competency restoration program for no more than 60 days of a 120-day commitment.” But during her confinement, she repeatedly refused to take medications or participate in the program. Jail staff saw many signs of severe mental illness that was untreated. She was found unresponsive in her tiny isolation cell on September 14, 2021. An autopsy determined the cause of death to be severe hypernatremia, a high concentration of sodium in the blood usually caused by dehydration.
Edgar Villatoro Alvarez was a month out of hospitalization for bipolar disorder when he was arrested for a DWI and booked into the jail in December 2021. Staffers repeatedly noted his “strange behavior”—stripping nude, talking incoherently. When he died two months later in February 2022, a medical examiner noted that he “recently ceased eating, drinking and taking his medications for [] the last several days.”
How did County Sheriff Bill E. Weybourn and his staff feel after three detainees died of thirst in less than two years? Chief Deputy Charles Eckert testified in a deposition that “all three inmates had 24/7 access to water … so it’s not a concern as long as we provide water to them.”
Studies have shown that mental illness can inhibit the natural thirst response to dehydration. But other depositions have shown that jailers are not trained to recognize the signs. On June 6, 2023, aided by Dallas attorneys T. Dean Malone, Michael T. O’Connor, Jennifer Kingaard and Alexandera W. Payne, Baldwin’s son filed a federal civil rights suit against the county, blaming her death on its policies and practices—such as short staffing the jail and encouraging guards’ false electronic entries of cell-check logs. See: Mattix v. Tarrant Cty., USDC (N.D. Tex.), Case No. 4:23-cv-00635.
Both cases remain pending, and PLN will update developments as they are available. The problem is not confined to Texas either. A Wisconsin jail dehydration death resulted in a $6.75 million settlement in 2019, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.51.]
Additional sources: KERA, Reason
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