A jury awarded $33 million to the family of a man who died inside an Oklahoma jail. Staff refused to help him and pretended his death was a suicide, lawsuit says.
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- A federal grand jury awarded Terral Ellis's family $33 million.
- Ellis died in Oklahoma's Ottowa County Jail in October 2015, according to the lawsuit.
- Jail staff ignored Ellis's cries for help as he died from sepsis, court documents say.
A federal grand jury awarded $33 million to the family of a man who died in an Oklahoma jail.
The lawsuit, seen by Insider, says jail staff refused to help and even mocked Terral Ellis, who was 26, as he died from sepsis and pneumonia.
Ellis died inside the Ottowa County Jail in Oklahoma on October 22, 2015, after jail staff repeatedly ignored his desperate pleas for medical help, according to the lawsuit. Ellis had been in the jail for 12 days for failure to appear in court on a DUI charge, according to The Frontier, a Tulsa-based nonprofit news organization.
Attorneys for Ellis's family said in the lawsuit that jail staff and nurses ignored the "obvious known and substantial risk" posed to his life by his medical condition, according to court documents.
"During this time period, Mr. Ellis continued to exhibit symptoms of a serious and life-threatening illness, including seizures, convulsions, uncontrollable sweating, dehydration, and the inability to walk, along with severe pain in his back, ribs, and internal organs," the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit says that Ellis was "so clearly in pain" that fellow inmates had to "hand feed and water him" and give him cups to urinate in that they would empty for him.
After telling a fellow inmate that he thought he was going to die in the jail, Ellis began having a seizure, which corrections officers responded to by sticking "ammonia sticks under Mr. Ellis' nose until the seizure ended," according to court documents.
"Then detention officers left as if nothing had happened," the lawsuit says. "They provided no medical care." The officers were "deliberately indifferent" to Ellis's needs, according to the lawsuit.
Ellis and another inmate both asked nurse Theresa Horn to help Ellis, but she and other jail staff responded that Ellis needed to "stop faking it and to lay down and serve his time," the lawsuit says.
According to The Frontier, court testimony revealed that jail staff also took steps to cover up Ellis's death, pretending it was a suicide. A jail nurse told paramedics that Ellis could have died by suicide, and he was found with a bedsheet tied around his neck, though an autopsy revealed no marks on his neck, the outlet reported.
Surveillance video from inside the jail obtained by KSNF, a local NBC affiliate based in nearby Joplin, Missouri, shows Ellis repeatedly screaming, telling corrections officers he is in pain and can't feel his legs. Later, the footage shows Horn screaming at Ellis and telling him to "shut up."
"I'm sick and fucking tired of dealing with your ass," Horn tells Ellis in the footage. "Aint nothing wrong with you."
The Frontier reported that the jail had a written policy to be skeptical of inmates who were asking for medical attention.
"Never let your guard down, never turn your back on them, don't ever let them gain your trust," the policy says, according to the outlet.
Horn and two corrections officers named as defendants in the lawsuit were never disciplined by the jail and never faced criminal charges for Ellis's death, according to The Frontier.
Ottawa County Sheriff David Dean, who took office after Ellis's death, told The Frontier that the staff members were not disciplined because the sheriff's department did not know the surveillance footage had audio until two years after the incident. The video footage surfaced after Ellis's family filed the lawsuit.
Ellis's family told the outlet that they are hopeful the verdict will bring about police reform. The money the family receives from the lawsuit will be used to help Ellis's son, who was four years old when he died, the family said.
"Terral Ellis was essentially tortured to death while housed in the Ottawa County Jail," the family statement says. "With a modicum of humane treatment, his suffering and death were eminently preventable."