Deschutes County, Ore. – A lawsuit filed by the family of a man who died in custody at the Deschutes County Jail has been settled.
Edwin Burl Mays III was 31 when he died in December 2014 of a methamphetamine overdose.
Deschutes County jail deputies mocked Mays and ignored his declining medical condition which showed in a surveillance video over the roughly four hours between his booking into the jail and being declared dead in a holding cell.
The sheriff’s office settled the suit for $1.025 million earlier this week. Mays’ family filed suit against the sheriff’s office initially for more than $15 million.
The Mays family asked the court to require the jail to start a drug treatment center, staffed by a nurse, in which inmates believed to be detoxing or overdosing could be held separately from the general inmate population.
In a statement issued Thursday, Sheriff Shane Nelson said although the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing, the jail has made several changes since Mays’ death to avoid a similar incident. The jail now has a nurse on duty at all hours and has purchased wristbands that can monitor an inmate’s heart rate and oxygen levels, an additional defibrillator, and Naloxone, a drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. A medical and mental health section of the jail has also been added, Nelson wrote, to improve monitoring of at-risk inmates.
Jennifer Coughlin, an attorney representing the Mays family, who spoke to The Bulletin, who said the family feels “vindicated” by the changes made at the jail. She said the family was ready to put the case behind them.
Coughlin said the settlement is the largest misconduct-related settlement against a local government operating a jail in Oregon’s history.
At the time of Mays’ death, Nelson was overseeing the jail, under then-Sheriff Larry Blanton. The Sheriff’s Office has said four of its employees were disciplined for their actions during Mays’ time at the jail, including two supervisors who were demoted, but the office has declined to name the deputies involved.
The county’s risk-management fund will pay $700,000 of the settlement, with the county’s insurance carrier picking up the remainder.
