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A small Pennsylvania county will pay nearly $ 5 million to a family of a teenager who has collapsed and died after four days of heroin detention in jail. The family's attorney said the prison staff had ignored his urgent medical needs for several days, and then lied about it.
Victoria "Tori" Herr, 18, was arrested for the first time on March 27, 2015, after police in search of her boyfriend found drugs in their apartment. Herr told staff at Lebanon Penitentiary Institution that she was using 10 bags of heroin a day and had told one of her cellmates that she feared that the process withdrawal is difficult.
According to the trial, she had severe vomiting and diarrhea within the next four days. He was given Ensure, water and adult diapers. But she could not hold back the liquids and collapsed from apparent dehydration while she was being brought back to her medical unit cell on March 31. She died at the hospital on April 5th.
"All who looked at her would have known that she was very sick and that she needed attention," said Jonathan Feinberg, a human rights lawyer at Philadelphia, who represents his family. "There was total disregard for her needs, which can only be linked to the fact that she was addicted."
He added that a simple emergency visit would have saved his life.
The family settled with the county this month for $ 4.75 million in claims for wrongful death and civil rights, he said. Feinberg thinks the medical staff lied about taking Herr's vital signs shortly before the collapse, since she never regained consciousness.
Hugh O'Neill, who represents the director, Robert Karnes, two nurses and other penitentiary staff, said that no county employee had acknowledged the existence wrongdoing in the context of the settlement. "The case has been resolved amicably," he said, refusing to indicate this week whether the county had reviewed or revised any policy following Herr's death.
Increasingly, policymakers view prison and penitentiary as the right time to intervene and provide medical assistance to people with opioid addiction.
In the three years following his death, John Wetzel, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Corrections, began offering methadone and other drugs approved to treat opioid addiction.
"The trend is turning in. I think very slowly, but surely, there are a lot of entities that really have had to look in the mirror and wonder how they are managing this disease," said Steve Seitchik, responsible for the Assisted Medication program. Treatment program in state prisons.
According to national research, about 25 percent of people entering local prisons are opioid addicted, according to Sally Friedman, vice president of legal activities at the National Action Center, a non-profit organization based in New York. Only a fraction of facilities offer drugs as part of a treatment plan, but their numbers are increasing, she said.
In Pennsylvania, the Wetzel Department now offers grants for county jails in order to also offer drug-assisted treatment.
Herr, severely dehydrated, had asked for lemonade during a phone call with his mother on March 30. Stephanie Moyer had tried to visit her later in the day but had been turned away and told her daughter that everything was fine. The next time she saw Herr – who graduated from high school despite her addiction – she was under ventilation.
Feinberg said he hoped the lawsuit would remind even the smallest counties of their obligation to care for those with addictions.
"The days when drug addicts were seen as unworthy of sympathy and care were gone," Feinberg said. "It's a very short chain of events that leads to death."
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