Family sues over Harris County inmate who killed himself in jail during drug withdrawal

Vincent Young died by suicide in the Harris County jail. Vincent Young died by suicide in the Harris County jail. Photo: HCSO Photo: HCSO Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close Family sues over Harris County inmate who killed himself in jail during drug withdrawal 1 / 17 Back to Gallery

The family of a man who killed himself during untreated drug withdrawal in the Harris County jail last year has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the local lock-up of inadequate staffing, insufficient suicide prevention procedures and sub-par medical care.

Vincent Dwayne Young, whose February 2017 death sparked local protests and led to an officer's firing, was found hanging by a bed sheet alone in his infirmary cell after jailers failed to check on him for more than an hour.

Initially, the 32-year-old's family questioned whether his death was truly a suicide. But now, the legal filing accuses the jail of failing to treat his withdrawal from anti-anxiety drugs, even though Young warned staff he was becoming depressed without his medication.

"Harris County has an atrocious record of inadequate medical care and mental health care," said attorney Randall Kallinen, who filed the lawsuit Sunday. "Harris County has been cited by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Texas Commission on Jail Standards for dangerous practices which have injured and killed many inmates."

READ MORE: Protesters question circumstances of jail inmate's death

On a windy Tuesday afternoon, Young's family gathered in front of the Harris County Jail and called on Sheriff Ed Gonzalez to make changes to prevent future tragedies within the facility.

"As far as taking care of inmates — that's a human life. You're responsible for a human life," said Kimaletha Wynn, Young's widow. "That's your job at that moment. Nothing else should be more important. Just because they're inmates — they're still humans. That doesn't mean you can mistreat them."

Wynn, 40, noted that her husband's death came after a slew of other jail suicides in recent years that exposed problems with jailer supervision and other failures within the sheriff's office handling of inmate care and inmate safety.

"Everybody's bring light to it, to what's going on, and they're still not stepping up," Wynn said. "How many more deaths have to come along to cause that? And it shouldn't [take any more]."

Menalie Young, Vincent's sister, said more transparency is needed.

"At end of day they come to do their time, and they should be able to come home to their families," she said. "This is going on far too long — we're now in 2019 — to still be standing here with a wife mourning the loss of her husband and family mourning over their father."

READ MORE: Inmate suicide note from Harris County jail points to systemic gaps in mental health care

Randall Kallinen, the lawyer representing Wynn and her relatives, said Young's death also revealed chronic underfunding by Harris County, leading to under-supervised jailers.

"The commissioners court has been very negligent in providing enough funds so Harris County jail can adequately care for its inmates," he said.

The suicide, one of four at the local lock-up over the past two years, eventually prompted the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to find the facility out-of-compliance for its lax supervision.

Though the fatality led to sweeping changes at the jail, since then the lock-up has been deemed non-compliant four more times —two of which were in connection with other suicides.

The Harris County Sheriff's Office did not comment on the legal claim, and the Harris County Attorney's Office did not respond Monday to a request for comment.

After he was booked into the jail on drug charges on Feb. 7, Young told medical staff he was on blood pressure medication, an opioid painkiller and the anti-anxiety medication Xanax.

But the jail didn't give him the mental health drug, and by his third day behind bars, Young "complained of racing thoughts, paranoia, that others were talking about him, causing him to sit in the corner," according to the lawsuit.

Still, the jail determined he didn't need any mental health services at that point, and his state of mind apparently continued to deteriorate.

"Suicidal tendencies are a well-known side effect of Xanax withdrawal," the lawsuit notes. "Weaning off Xanax is best practices for Xanax withdrawal."

Read more: Round the clock help hotline for inmates

On the fifth day in jail, another inmate walked up and told guards he was worried Young might be suicidal, so the detention officers took him to a holdover cell.

He was later moved to the jail infirmary because of his withdrawal and high blood pressure, but staff decided to wait until he finishing detoxing before doing a psychiatric evaluation.

Then, on Feb. 13, a jailer found him dead in his cell, hanging from a bedsheet. Guards hadn't checked on him for over an hour, and no one had actually set foot in his cell for nearly six hours, according to the lawsuit.

Afterward, the jailer who should have been responsible for the checks said he was too busy escorting staff to visit prisoners in other infirmary cells, so he didn't have time to do required rounds.

Instead, he allegedly recorded several cell checks that never happened. Texas Rangers later found nearly two dozen discrepancies in the round sheets.

The officer in question was later fired, and the jail stepped up it suicide prevention efforts by seeking funding to install more surveillance cameras in health services cells and implementing a new policy requiring random weekly audits to make sure jailers were really doing rounds as often as required.

The jail also removed bedsheets from certain cells and replaced them with blankets. And this year — after another suicide — officials created a round-the-clock help hotline for inmates.

But still, the lawsuit Kallinen filed cites the jail for making a practice of understaffing, failing to make sure guards did rounds, and failing to provide adequate oversight. Though the jail has a below-average suicide rate, according to officials, the lock-up has been repeatedly noted for failing to supervise inmates.

After the state cited the facility for lack of supervision leading up to Young's death, they were still in non-compliance when the commission chastised them again in April 2017, this time for leaving inmates in a transport van overnight.

Then in December, the jail racked up another non-compliance when Maytham Alsaedy killed himself in his cell just a week before he was scheduled to plead guilty to capital murder.

In August, Debora Lyons hanged herself with a bed sheet in a common area of the jail, marking the second suicide in a matter of weeks. She'd been locked up on a theft charge and couldn't make the $1,500 bail. According to a source familiar with the case, she had threatened suicide at least once in the days before her death.

Afterward, the county was cited again and submitted a corrective action plan, but state officials hadn't yet marked the jail compliant with that plan when they failed parts of an annual inspection in November and racked up another non-compliance.