[D66] Indiana Jail Let Man With Schizophrenia Starve to Death in Solitary

[René Oudeweg]

theappeal.org 
<https://theappeal.org/joshua-mclemore-died-solitary-jackson-county-jail-indiana/> 



  Indiana Jail Let Man With Schizophrenia Starve to Death in Solitary,
  Lawsuit Alleges

Tana Ganeva Apr 12, 2023
10–12 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------


    Graphic video footage obtained by The Appeal shows 29-year-old
    Joshua McLemore wasting away and rolling in his own waste in the
    Jackson County Jail before eventually dying of malnutrition.

Jackson County Sheriff's Office


    Indiana Jail Let Man With Schizophrenia Starve to Death in Solitary,
    Lawsuit Alleges


    Graphic video footage obtained by The Appeal shows 29-year-old
    Joshua McLemore wasting away and rolling in his own waste in the
    Jackson County Jail before eventually dying of malnutrition.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jackson County Sheriff’s Office employees in Indiana locked a man having 
a psychotic episode in solitary confinement for three weeks—without 
mental health care or even toilet access—until he died of malnutrition, 
according to a lawsuit filed today 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23773602-mclemorecomplaintfinaldraft> 
and video footage of the incident obtained by The Appeal.

On July 20, 2021, apartment managers entered 29-year-old Indiana 
resident Joshua McLemore’s home, found him confused, incoherent, and 
nude on the floor, and had McLemore transported to a Seymour, Indiana, 
hospital. McLemore’s mother had called her son’s living complex, worried 
he could have been having a psychotic episode. At the hospital, McLemore 
grabbed a nurse’s hair and the Seymour Police Department arrested him on 
battery charges.

At the Jackson County Jail, McLemore, who had schizophrenia, was 
stripped naked and thrown into solitary confinement in what was known as 
“Padded Cell 7 
<https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ta3e6gkula815j9/AADPlicCFOGAtavlOdEiYyTma/Jackson%20County%20Jail%20records?dl=0&preview=Electronic+log+entries.pdf&subfolder_nav_tracking=1>,” 
a small room without toilet access.

Surveillance footage over 21 days shows him screaming; rocking back and 
forth; licking the walls; smearing his feces and urine all over the 
floor; violently shoving a plastic bottle into his rectum; throwing his 
food on the ground; and eating the styrofoam food trays that made their 
way through the thin slot at the cell door.

According to the lawsuit, he lost 45 pounds in less than a month. Jail 
staff rarely checked in on him. Jackson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) 
employees occasionally placed McLemore in restraints and wheeled him 
into a shower as JCSO forced other imprisoned people to clean the 
excrement in his cell. On August 8, a guard named Beverly texted her 
supervisor, “Just bathed him. And he can’t hold his hands, legs, 
anything. He’s dead weight.”

In the footage, McLemore’s body visibly shrinks over weeks until he 
doesn’t have the strength to hold his head up.

“Get up, buddy,” a corrections officer asks. But he can’t. In one 
portion of the footage, a female guard sprays him with liquid soap and 
hoses him down so that he does not smell before EMS comes.

On August 8, jail officials noticed that McLemore—visibly emaciated and 
unable to hold up his body—likely needed medical care. But medical 
officials were unable to save him. According to a suit, doctors listed 
McLemore’s cause of death as “multiple organ failure due to refusal to 
eat or drink with altered mental status due to untreated schizophrenia.”

McLemore’s family alleges that at least 20 people, including Sheriff 
<https://theappeal.org/the-power-of-sheriffs-an-explainer/> Rick Meyer, 
had access to roughly 400 hours of footage of McLemore wasting away in 
his cell. Edwin Budge, the family’s attorney, said he could not 
understand why no one called 911 earlier.

“I think that’s the million-dollar question,” Budge said. “I don’t think 
there’s a good answer. It’s a systemic deficiency that runs from the top 
down.” The family is suing the county, the sheriff’s office, and 
Advanced Correctional Healthcare, the for-profit medical company that 
cared for McLemore in jail, for allegedly violating McLemore’s civil rights.

Budge added that the incident was “not a mistake. This was day after day 
of neglect.”

McLemore is not the only person who died after being allegedly left 
without care in the Jackson County Jail. In 2021, 23-year-old Ta’Neasha 
Chappell died 
<https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/indiana/2021/12/18/taneasha-chappell-death-update-indiana-prosecutor-declines-charges/8946040002/> 
after she begged for help and repeatedly vomited blood inside the 
facility. 
<https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/crime/2022/01/21/taneasha-chappell-louisville-woman-begged-for-help-before-jail-death/6579985001/>The 
Louisville Courier-Journal previously reported 
<https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/investigations/2021/09/01/taneasha-chappell-case-investigation-launched-into-2nd-inmate-death/5622585001/> 
that Indiana State Police had launched an investigation into McLemore’s 
death in 2021. The following year, prosecutors announced that no one 
would be criminally charged 
<https://fox59.com/indiana-news/naked-tired-and-hungry-investigation-into-inmate-death-reveals-apparent-negligence/> 
over the ordeal.

The sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for 
comment. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Advanced 
Correctional Healthcare said that the company takes “criticisms of the 
care provided by our team seriously” but is prohibited by federal 
privacy laws from discussing individual medical cases.

The spokesperson’s email signature included a Bible quote.

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or 
a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help 
you?’” the quote reads.*^*“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever 
you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ 
Matthew 25:44-45.”


Rhonda McLemore (left) and Joshua McLemore (right) smiling at the camera 
during Christmas time. A Santa Claus statue stands between them.
Rhonda McLemore (left) and Joshua McLemore (right)

Courtesy of the McLemore family

McLemore was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. According to the suit, he 
liked reading and playing chess. His mother, Rhonda, was a single mother 
and a member of the US Navy. In high school, he started having mental 
health problems and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was 
hospitalized repeatedly during his lifetime for mental health issues and 
fluctuated between periods of relative stability and mental illness and 
drug use. He moved to Seymour, Indiana, a town of about 20,000 people, 
in 2020.

But, by July 2021, McLemore’s condition had worsened again. After 
McLemore’s mother alerted the staff at her son’s apartment complex that 
he might be in trouble, facility managers called 911. Per the suit, 
emergency responders said McLemore had acted erratically, given the 
wrong name, and did not let medical personnel touch him.

After being coaxed into the ambulance, medical professionals reported 
that McLemore began chewing on the seatbelts and railings attached to 
his stretcher. Hospital records state that McLemore admitted to having 
used methamphetamine in the past. The drug is common in Southern 
Indiana—the area is known as the “honey hole” 
<https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/crime/2020/12/22/meth-pipeline-into-midwest-reveals-cjng-drug-cartels-honey-hole/3871167001/> 
due to its reputation as a meth pipeline.

When a hospital nurse leaned in too closely to check on McLemore, the 
suit states that he pulled her hair. The hospital then called the 
Seymour Police Department, which shackled his arms and legs and carried 
him out wearing nothing but underwear. The suit states that McLemore bit 
the police’s car door as cops placed him inside.

Once at the Jackson County Jail, the suit states that JCSO and medical 
personnel failed to take McLemore’s baseline vital signs and instead 
threw him alone into a small, rectangular room with only a covered 
window in his cell door. Fluorescent lights blared overhead 24 hours a 
day. When McLemore arrived at the jail, the suit states that jail 
employees stripped him nude and left him in a corner of the cell. 
McLemore then began licking the walls and loudly asking, “Where am I?”

The UN considers more than 15 days 
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/united-states-prolonged-solitary-confinement-amounts-psychological-torture> 
in solitary to be torture 
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/united-states-prolonged-solitary-confinement-amounts-psychological-torture>. 
However, JCSO officials held McLemore in the cell 
<https://theappeal.org/politicalreport/sheriffs-solitary-confinement/> 
for the next three weeks as a camera recorded him. The suit alleges 
that, even though Indiana law mandates that people held in solitary 
confinement must be let out of their cells for an hour each day, JCSO 
officials did not bother to do so. The jail is otherwise 
overcrowded—despite not having the facilities to care for people 
long-term, the jail, like many others around the country, houses people 
both pretrial and for prison stays. But Budge, the family’s attorney, 
stressed that overcrowding did not explain what happened to his client.

“Everyone just decided it was a problem for the next shift,” he said.

Jail staff placed McLemore on “medical observation,” which meant 
employees needed to check on him every 15 minutes. The cell contained a 
room with a toilet and sink, but officials left the door to that area 
locked. The suit alleges that McLemore was too mentally unwell to ask to 
use the bathroom. Instead, he used the floor.

“He walked barefoot in his own human waste, rolled around in it, and ate 
food from it,” the suit says. “He lay on a urine-covered mat and wrapped 
himself in a urine-soaked blanket. He did all of this in plain view of 
the guards who were supposed to be monitoring him every 15 minutes.”

McLemore barely slept, ate, or drank during his stay in the cell. 
According to the suit, jail logs state that McLemore retrieved just 19 
of the drinks he was given during his 20-day stay at the facility. On 
August 8, the lawsuit says guards noticed McLemore’s condition had grown 
so poor that he likely needed medical care. He could not drink a bottle 
of Gatorade on his own and needed to be fed the drink by hand. Before 
being sent to the hospital, jail officials again washed him by pouring a 
few buckets of cold water over his body and scrubbing him with a towel. 
He was intubated upon arriving at the hospital and eventually diagnosed 
with multiple medical conditions, including a lack of oxygen in his 
blood, severe dehydration, and kidney failure.

The local hospital eventually decided it could not care for him, and 
McLemore was airlifted to an ICU in Cincinnati. His mother, Rhonda, 
traveled to the facility from Mississippi. And, on August 10, Rhonda 
McLemore decided she had no other option but to take her son off of life 
support and let him die.

Roughly 16 months later, Rhonda herself had a fatal heart attack. Her 
family believes she died of grief.

“They’re sure his awful death put a hole in her heart, and that’s what 
killed her,” Budge said.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/The Appeal is publishing video of the incident with the approval of 
McLemore’s family. To watch the footage, //click here./ 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j61mE1C3ERo>

/This piece has been updated to include a statement from Advanced 
Correctional Healthcare./
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