In October 2015, 26-year-old Terral Ellis Jr. turned himself into Ottawa County officials on an outstanding DUI warrant he had. Six days later he was dead from sepsis and pneumonia. His family filed a lawsuit against the sheriff of the county, the former jailers, and nurse who were there during the last week of Ellis Jr.’s life, and allegedly did not heed his calls for help just hours before he was found unresponsive in his cell. According to his family, Ellis went into jail healthy.
CBS News obtained public surveillance video from the jail (a video you can watch below), showing workers not responding to Ellis Jr.’s please for help, with a nurse—identified as former jail nurse Theresa Horn—responding to his pleas by telling him that the EMTs found nothing wrong with him and that she was “sick and tired of fucking dealing with your ass. Ain’t a damn thing wrong with you.” In the very graphic video below, there are a few truly terrible moments: around the 3:30 mark, a man walks by where Ellis Jr. is wailing and seems to chuckle at his distress, and then, in the footage, Horn walks past and flippantly jokes, “that poor guy needs help.”
According to CBS News, Horn’s attorney says the video released doesn’t show the “complete picture,” including medical attention Ellis received the previous day. County Sheriff Jeremy Floyd is named in the lawsuit, though he was not working there when the incident took place. Floyd told CBS that he “was floored” upon seeing the video and believed a civil rights investigation should be pursued. The next step will be for a judge to decide whether or not the federal lawsuit can advance to trial.
Oklahoma, like many American prisons and local jails, has a history of dubious deaths and inhumane treatment of inmates. Last summer a federal lawsuit was filed against the Oklahoma Department of Corrections after 21-year-old Joshua England, serving a 343 day prison term for fourth-degree arson, died due to complications from appendicitis—after allegedly vomiting blood, and complaining of abdominal pain for over a week.
Oklahoma prisons, and specifically Fort Sill, have been a major battleground of the immigration protests against the Trump administration’s gestapo-like ICE detainment program. It’s taken more than a dozen deaths in a few weeks, loads of media coverage, and numerous lawsuits to get the Department of Justice to open up an investigation into the conditions in Mississippi prisons.
According to The New York Times, the lawsuit is asking for punitive and compensatory damages of $75,000 each as well as attorney fees.
WARNING: The video has audio and is incredibly distressing and sad.