Price, a developmentally disabled and severely mentally ill man, died of malnutrition and dehydration inside an Arkansas jail.
in the town, Fort Smith, were used to seeing Price, then 50, coming in, hanging around for a bit, then leaving.
At times weighing 200 pounds or more, Larry Eugene Price, Jr., died in jail in August 2021 at 90 pounds. A lawsuit filed Friday says the Sebastian County Detention Center neglected his care and effectively starved Price to death.By the time emergency services arrived at the jail to attempt to resuscitate, Price, normally a solid man, weighed just 90 pounds, EMS records show. Yet, even after his death, the jail monitors continued to give reports stating,"Inmate and Cell OK.
Autopsy photos show the deterioration of the normally bulky and tall Larry Eugene Price, a developmentally disabled paranoid schizophrenic whom a federal lawsuit filed Friday claims was starved to death and allowed to languish for more than a year in solitary confinement, eating his own waste and denied psychiatric care and attention from jail and health staff.
"I have personally reviewed the entire Arkansas State Police investigative file, which includes interviews with the Detention Center staff, Arkansas State Police reports, and the autopsy report, before making this decision," wrote Sebastian County Prosecuting Attorney Daniel Shue, who also reviewed video footage from the jail."It is the opinion of this office that no criminal charges can be filed against any person with regard to this death.
At the time of Price's arrest, coming so soon after Floyd's murder during a police confrontation in May 2020, there were nationwide calls to upend traditional policing and shift resources away from armed patrol officers and arrests to helping the mentally ill and and the poor and ailing in America's neighborhoods – particularly in the Black community.
Sebastian County Circuit Judge Stephen Tabor, who got Price's case, set the low bond and later ordered an acute care evaluation for Price, was also surprised by the details of Price's death.
The oldest of three children, Price stayed behind in Fort Smith with his father after his parents divorced, while his younger brother and sister moved with their mother to Little Rock, according to the brother, Rodney Price. His father, Larry Eugene Price, Sr., died in 2008. His online obituary, posted by Veasley Funeral Home, reads in part,"He loved the Lord and gave himself to Him around the age of 34 years old. Larry, Jr. loved his family and laughing. He truly loved making and seeing others laugh. He also loved cooking, fishing and he was a good dancer."
His aunt, Beverly Ann Releford, who still lives in the area, said Price was an outgoing kid, someone who played football around the neighborhood where they grew up."He was, you know, real. If someone took things from him, and that happened – poaching, you know – he gets upset and stuff like that. But he was good. He was a real good person."
Releford and her husband were never allowed by the jail to visit Price. Mostly, she figured that was because of COVID, but she was also told that Price had to write down her name as a visitor. In Price's mental and physical state, she said, he was unable to do that. Her anger is clear. "Being familiar with Price and his typical behavior," wrote one officer of the August 19, 2020, incident in a report,"I also felt it would be in his own best interest to have multiple officers place him under arrest or otherwise calm him."
Price was noticed unresponsive by jail staff early on August 29, 2021, in his flooded cell - a state investigator said it was routine that inmates over-flush toilets and that leads to flooding. No nurse was on duty at the time, and efforts by staff to resuscitate him failed. Because of the wet conditions, a portable defibrillator was not used. Price was taken to Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith, about five miles from the detention center, where he was pronounced dead.
The filing goes on to say the company, a regional provider of health care to places of incarceration, knew of the Sebastian County jail's"failures and knew that they subjected patients with serious mental illness to a substantial risk of suffering serious harm, but it did not correct the failures. These failures resulted in Mr. Price's suffering and death."
For example, the suit says that Price was supposed to see Lewis on November 24, 2020 – three months after his jail booking. Regarding that appointment, Heipt writes in the filing that Lewis reported only that Price was refusing to be seen or take medication. Instead of intervening, the suit states,"Lewis abruptly discontinued Mr. Price's mental health medications," and never advised or ordered the facility and medical staff there to step up treatment to care for Price's needs.
Price, off his psychiatric medications at that time, never had any medications resume."Lewis never made any effort to follow up with Mr. Price or to address his serious mental health needs. Consequently, despite his severe mental illness, Mr. Price received no additional psychotropic medication at the jail for the remaining nine months of his pretrial detention...Predictably, Mr. Price continued to deteriorate.
Heipt, through a public records request, obtained printouts of the logs for wellbeing checks."Between August 1 and August 29, 2021," according to the suit's allegations,"jail guards logged over 4,000 consecutive wellbeing checks of Mr. Price, and each time they made the exact same entry: 'Inmate and Cell OK.'...In the last 48 hours of Mr. Price's confinement alone, they made this entry more than 300 successive times.
"Simply put, the federal government does not know how many people die in U.S. jails and prisons each year," Vera said in an article in March 2022. This, despitein the 2000s passing the Death in Custody Reporting Act – which was supposed to accomplish just that. It's also hard to gauge how many inmates suffer mental health problems or crises. Various advocacy groups estimate the number of inmates with mental disorders differently, but all agree it's a severe concern. For its part, the Prison Policy Institute reports some 43% of prison inmates reported a mental disorder; the number is one point higher, 44%, in local jails, while one in four people experience"serious psychological distress" in jails.
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