Arkansas man who couldn’t afford $1K bail starves to death in jail
Loved ones of a man who starved to death in an Arkansas jail have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the jail and medical facility responsible for his care.
On Aug. 19, 2020, 50-year-old Larry Eugene Price Jr. was arrested in Fort Smith and held in the Sebastian County Jail.
Price, who dealt with precarious housing leading up to his arrest, had an IQ of under 55. He wasn’t married, didn’t have a job, and was suffering from a host of mental health issues.
Rather than recognizing Price was in crisis, police charged him with Terroristic Threatening in the First Degree.
It wasn’t like officials didn’t know who they were dealing with either. Price had been to jail, according to court documents, multiple times in 2019 and in the first part of 2020, mostly for disorderly conduct and trespassing charges. During that time, jail staff became aware of his serious mental health needs.
In fact, he had just been detained for six weeks at the same facility and released on Aug. 11, 2020.
Price couldn’t afford to pay his $1,000 bail, and because of it, he spent the next year behind bars.
Instead of releasing Price on bail, it was deemed more effective to incarcerate him at the Arkansas Department of Corrections' 2021 average cost of $65.54 per day — over $20,000 per person per year — paid in public taxes.
According to the state’s Department of Corrections, costs include expenses for housing, food, health care, and security.
For most of that year, despite his dire need of urgent psychiatric care, Mr. Price languished alone in solitary confinement—in a state of active psychosis—neglected by jail medical and custody staff.
Victim ‘resembled a victim of famine’
Because of his ongoing psychosis, Price barely ate or drank.
Between February and April 2021, the lawsuit claims officials periodically monitored his food and water intake. Aside from that, his life-threatening condition was completely ignored by medical staff, who "simply watched from the sidelines as he steadily decompensated."
Price’s lawyer noted that in the last months of his client’s pretrial confinement, he "was so visibly emaciated that he resembled a victim of famine."
As time went on, Price found himself being denied his one hour out of solitary confinement per day due to his erratic behavior.
When his doctor was alerted that Price wasn’t eating and refused to take his medication, he ended his prescription for antipsychotic medication, and according to the lawsuit, he never followed up again over the final nine months of their patient’s life.
Not only did the doctor neglect to provide a treatment plan for the patient or jail personnel, he also failed to determine whether Price was fit to continue being held in police custody.
On Jan. 8, 2021, Price submitted a sick-call request to medical staff, saying he was ill and had lost a significant amount of weight. His request was denied due to his "non-compliant" behavior.
Just three weeks later, a nurse was told that Price was "eating his own feces and drinking his own urine." Her solution was to get jail staff to start a food and fluid log, and the lawsuit alleges the nurse failed to notify her superiors of his condition.
He weighed in at 150 pounds that day, losing 35 pounds in a matter of less than five months.That was the last time health-care officials weighed Price, who lost another 75 pounds before he died six months later.
The log was filled out once in January, five times in February, twice in March, and seven times in April. None of the logs submitted were fully completed.
In May, a county circuit court judge ordered Price to undergo a psychiatric assessment to determine whether he met the threshold for the mental state required to prove guilt of a crime and to determine whether he was mentally fit to stand trial.
That assessment never happened.
According to the jail’s electronic logging system, over 4,000 wellbeing checks were reported to have been done on Price in the final four weeks of his life, yet not one staff member did anything to save his life. At least 300 of these checks were supposedly conducted in the final 48 hours of Price’s life.
On Aug 29. 2021, just one year after his freedom was taken away, Price was found unconscious in solitary confinement, "lying in a pool of standing water and urine." He died a short time later in hospital.
According to the coroner’s report, Price died from "acute dehydration and malnutrition."
The Arkansas State Medical Examiner’s Office noted Price was taken into custody as a well-nourished man, standing at six-foot-two and weighing 185 pounds. But when paramedics took Price to the hospital, they estimated he weighed about 90 pounds.
Photographs taken on the day he died, which The Blueprint has chosen not to republish both due to their graphic nature and out of respect for Price, detailed what the lawsuit calls a "morbidly skeletal appearance."
The medical examiner also found "profoundly shrivelled (or pruned) condition" of Price’s feet.
Price suffered from "prolonged moisture exposure" from a pool of contaminated water on the jail’s concrete floor — a condition long outlawed by the United States Constitution.
Not only did the contaminated water significantly damage his feet, its presence prevented first responders from using an electronic defibrillator to restart his heart — something that could have saved Price’s life.
Price’s body was found lifeless, with his eyes open and saliva drying along his mouth. The autopsy report described his body as "cachectic, with prominent bony structures of the chest and back being visible," before going on to say his eyes were "sunken into their orbital sockets" and his "clavicle and rib cage skeletal structures being prominent."
Shockingly, jail staff made at least 10 additional entries of "Inmate and Cell OK" after Price was pronounced dead in hospital.
Now, Price’s estate has filed a federal civil rights action against the prison’s health-care facility to challenge his constitutional rights violations as a pretrial detainee, while also holding the defendants accountable for Price’s "unnecessary pain and suffering, the loss of his life, and the grief and anguish of his surviving family members."
One of the defendants, Turn Key Health Clinics, is a private, for-profit correctional health-care corporation based in Oklahoma. Turn Key was contracted by the Sebastian County Jail, another defendant, to "provide necessary medical and mental health services to people confined" at the facility.
Those responsibilities included "adopting, implementing, and enforcing policies pertaining to medical and mental health care for people confined at the jail." Personnel were also required to ensure the care provided to detainees "met minimum constitutional standards" and to ensure staff and contractors were trained to meet those standards of care.
"Although Sebastian County sought to offload its jail medical operations by contracting with Turn Key, it remains liable for any negligence or unconstitutional policies or practices that resulted in harm to any person confined in the jail," the suit argues. "Price suffered in the torturous throes of his untreated mental disorder for months on end as jail healthcare and security staff watched him waste away — apathetic to his life-threatening medical and mental health needs and the cruelty of his confinement."
His loved ones argue it wasn’t just the "deliberate indifference and neglect" to Price’s condition that caused his death, but also systemic deficiencies in the jail’s policies and practices, "which put severely mentally ill people at significant risk of serious harm or death."
"The constitution mandates better treatment of society’s most vulnerable victims."