December 11th 2008 (inmate Death)

This week has already been real busy. Let me let you guys know about what happened early this night.


Story #2: Inmate Death, Nurse Incompetence

While working today, a call went out over the radio for a "man down", meaning a nurse needed to respond to the indicated location. I responded to the floor and on the way up there it was put out over the radio that this inmate was not breathing.

I got to the floor went directly over to the cell he was in and discovered they now knew this man had no pulse, and still was not breathing.

I began scanning the body and discovered his feet were already purple, also his hands, lips and face looked the same.

The nurse were soon there, but these county nurses sometimes are very unreliable. It is well known amongst the deputies that if we are in any kind of medical trouble, don't let the nurses work on us, wait for paramedics, we don't mind if they work on the inmates, but definitely not us.

So for the first 6-8 minutes that the nurses are on seen, all they do is continue to try to find his pulse, at about the 9Th minute I suggest to the nurses "shouldn't you nurses perform CPR on this guy", and it was as if a light bulb turned on.

They spent 9 minutes with this man not breathing and his heart beating and could not figure out they needed to perform CPR. They begin doing the CPR slower than I have ever seen before(about 40 compressions a minute, should be 100 compressions a minute). This man was obviously not going to make it. I also took it upon myself to call for paramedics, because who knows how long until they would have figured that out.

At that point they tried to move this 6'2" 320 lb man, but he was stiff as a board. What this meant is this man had been dead for hours. So even though these nurses were un-qualified and if he had a chance they destroyed it, he was probably long gone before they got there.

I don't know what is worse, the skill level of these nurses, or that my deputy partners didn't find this man dead for hours.