Wisconsin will pay nearly $19 million to former teen inmate injured in suicide attempt

MADISON - The state agreed Tuesday to pay $18.9 million to a former teen inmate who was severely brain damaged after a failed suicide attempt at the state's problem-ravaged juvenile prison.

The girl's attorney, Eric Haag, described it as the largest civil rights settlement the state has ever reached. With other inmate lawsuits pending, Wisconsin taxpayers could be on the hook for further payouts.

The settlement was announced just hours after the state Senate unanimously approved a deal to close Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau.

The Assembly is to approve the measure Thursday and send it to Gov. Scott Walker.

The prison is the subject of multiple other lawsuits and a 3-year-old criminal investigation into child neglect and prisoner abuse.

Officials in Walker's administration have known about wide-ranging problems at the prison complex for six years. Walker embraced the idea of closing Lincoln Hills this January after earlier saying changes his administration had pursued would turn the facility around.

The girl, Sydni Briggs of Janesville, was 16 when she was held at Copper Lake for breaking into a liquor store and stealing several bottles of vodka and gin. On Nov. 9, 2015, she turned on a call light that staff were supposed to respond to immediately.

Guards could see into Briggs' room from a video camera, but no one came to her door for nearly 24 minutes. By then, she had hanged herself with a torn T-shirt, had no pulse and was not breathing. Staff revived her with CPR and a defibrillator.

An expert witness determined Briggs was hanging for 2 to 5 minutes, which suggests staff could have stopped it if they had responded to her call light promptly, Haag said.

"The tragedy is that this was preventable and it didn’t require heroics or anything extraordinary to prevent it from occurring," he said in a statement. "If people had competently done their jobs and fulfilled basic responsibilities this would not have happened."

She spent the next four months in a coma and was later moved to a rehabilitation center. Briggs, now 19, uses a wheelchair, has the cognition of a young child and is expected to require around-the-clock care for the rest of her life that will cost $200,000 or more a year.

Haag said he has met her about 10 times over two years but has had to re-introduce himself every time because of her poor memory.

In a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel interview at her rehab center last year, Briggs said she could not remember details about her time at Copper Lake but was not happy there.

“Nothing good," she said of what she recalled of Copper Lake. "It was all bad.”

Four months before Briggs hanged herself, an audit of operations at the prison found staff were not routinely checking call lights when inmates turned them on.

Three weeks before Briggs tried to kill herself, she told a prison psychiatrist she had suicidal thoughts and sometimes viewed life as not worth living. Those comments came just months after Briggs began discussing for the first time sexual abuse that happened to her when she was 13.

But on the morning of her suicide attempt, Briggs was not on a special monitoring schedule used to prevent suicidal inmates from hurting themselves.

At the time of her suicide attempt, guards said they were checking on her every 15 minutes. In fact, they had not checked on her for 42 minutes, a recent internal investigation showed.

An earlier internal investigation gave no indication of the extent of the problems leading up to Briggs' suicide attempt, including that guards had falsified records claiming they had routinely checked on Briggs. Haag called that investigation a "cover-up."

Three staff members involved in the incident — Andrew Yorde, Darrell Stetzer and Rosemary Esterholm — this month ended their employment at the prison, according to the state Department of Corrections. A department spokesman declined to say if they quit or were fired.

RELATED: Girl gravely injured in suicide attempt at Copper Lake prison

In a statement, Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher said prison officials have made numerous upgrades to the prison since the incident, including hiring more mental health professionals and greatly expanding training for guards.

"These changes have dramatically changed the culture and environment at (Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake) for the better," his statement said.

More than $11 million will go to trust funds set up for Briggs. About $7.5 million will go toward attorney fees and litigation costs.

The state is paying about $4 million of the cost, with the remainder being paid by its insurers.

Haag said he was glad to see Walker and lawmakers planned to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake but said changes need to go further to put new officials in charge of juvenile corrections.

"The outcome isn’t going to change dramatically by a change in geography alone," he said in his statement.

The Assembly last month unanimously approved the measure to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. But it needs to take it up again because the Senate made minor changes to it Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said that would happen Thursday.

RELATED: GOP split leaves closure of teen prison in doubt as senator says FBI probe of Lincoln Hills is done

RELATED: Crisis at Lincoln Hills juvenile prison years in making

The legislation, Assembly Bill 953, would send inmates from Lincoln Hills to new or refurbished facilities that would be established between now and 2021.

Those facilities would be smaller than the sprawling campus at Lincoln Hills, which now has 150 inmates and has room to hold hundreds more.

The most serious inmates would remain in high-security institutions run by the state. Those who committed lesser offenses would be held in county-run facilities.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) for weeks had said he didn't like aspects of the bill and wanted to go a different route. But he relented Tuesday and within hours the Senate voted 32-0 without debate to largely go along with the Assembly plan.

One tweak would require the Legislature's budget committee in the years ahead to sign off on final details, such as where the new lockups would be located and which counties would run them.

The measure includes $80 million in borrowing to establish or refurbish facilities to house teen inmates. Under the proposal, 29 beds would be added at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Madison, which houses inmates with mental health problems.

Other lawsuits prompted by conditions at Lincoln Hills continue. One was brought by an inmate whose arm was broken; the guards who allegedly took him to the ground received letters in December from federal prosecutors telling them they could be charged with a crime.

Another lawsuit was brought by inmates with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and Juvenile Law Center. That litigation is ongoing but resulted in an injunction last year that forced Walker's administration to reduce its use of pepper spray and solitary confinement.