Inset: Jail surveillance camera footage shows Victor Stevenson lying on the floor of his cell, writhing in pain. Background: Jail officers allegedly caught on video mocking how Victor Stevenson smelled (Exhibit/Nichols Law Group).
An Oregon man was "mocked" by jail staff "because he reeked" of urine and feces that they forced him to lie in — leading to a "deteriorating condition" and gangrenous leg that went "unaddressed" for days, resulting in an amputation, according to a lawsuit.
"A 59-year-old man in a fatal-range medical emergency, soaked in his own waste, was treated as the punchline to the deputies' joke — and their own cameras recorded it," a federal complaint filed by the inmate, Victor Stevenson, charges Klamath County, its sheriff, its deputies and the jail's medical provider.
"This is a civil-rights action for the near-killing of a man in a county jail," the complaint alleges.
Stevenson, who is now 61, claims sheriff's deputies and jail staff watched him "decompensate from a psychiatric and medical crisis into a fatal-range emergency." This included Stevenson "pacing naked in a darkened cell, hallucinating, falling, meowing, incontinent and lying in his own feces without access to a toilet, and rolling on a concrete floor until the skin tore from his legs," according to the complaint.
Stevenson had been brought to the jail while facing misdemeanor charges for criminal trespass, resisting arrest and escape. He later pleaded guilty only to the trespass charge, while the resisting and escape charges were dismissed.
"They never took a single set of vital signs," the complaint says. "They never sent him to a hospital, even though their own written policy required emergency clearance before they ever accepted him."
According to the complaint, the county's neglect was "so prolonged and so complete" that it allowed gangrene and widespread tissue death "to develop in a living man's leg." The tissue death "necessitated the amputation" of his leg at the hip and "contributed to the cascade of other catastrophic injuries," including sepsis and kidney failure that nearly killed him, the complaint says.
On Stevenson's fifth day in custody, jail staff moved him and "mocked Stevenson because he reeked of the urine and feces they had left him to lie in," according to the complaint.
"Body-worn camera footage shows that, as officers lifted his limp body into a wheelchair, defendant Davidson told him to 'lift your feet up for us as best as you can,' then broke into laughter mid-sentence because [a sergeant] was holding his hand up under [another officer's] nose, gesturing at the stench," the complaint says. "Moments later, [the sergeant] again held his hand up to another officer's face and asked, 'Wanna smell?' [The sergeant] then joked to a nearby officer that Mr. Stevenson would be transported 'in the trunk' of that officer's vehicle."
The complaint states that when jail staff "finally called for help on the fifth day," it was too late to save Stevenson's leg. According to the complaint, he arrived at the emergency department of a local hospital in critical condition, "profoundly dehydrated," in kidney failure, in septic shock, with a "completely occluded" arterial stent and no blood flow to his left leg.
At one point, Stevenson's heart allegedly stopped and had to be restarted.
"Surgeons amputated his entire left leg at the hip," the complaint says.
"The loss of the leg was the product of tissue death that set in while Mr. Stevenson lay untreated in the jail," the document adds. "During the days the county left his occluded artery and his visibly deteriorating condition unaddressed, his left leg was starved of blood flow and its tissue began to die. By the time he was finally taken to a hospital, the leg was gangrenous, and his surgeons determined that it was non-salvageable because of life-threatening necrosis and sepsis; pathological testing of the amputated limb later confirmed the presence of gangrene."
Stevenson is seeking unspecified economic, noneconomic and punitive damages, according to the complaint. Klamath County and its sheriff's office have not responded to media requests seeking comment on the lawsuit.
"The unlawfulness of leaving an incoherent, medically unevaluated detainee to deteriorate for days and then mocking and dragging him while he was unable to stand was obvious to any reasonable official," the complaint concludes.
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