Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
PITTSBURGH — Allegheny County Jail workers ignored the pleas of a pregnant, dying inmate and failed to get her life-saving treatment, her family alleges in a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
“I think that our office has some concerns about the conduct in the jail, the care, or sometimes lack of care, provided to inmates,” said attorney Robert N. Peirce, who filed the case on behalf of Luann Gillespie Shultz and whose firm is involved in another lawsuit against the jail. “Yes, these are individuals convicted of a crime, but they have rights, including basic medical care.”
Amy L. Gillespie was 27 — and 18 weeks pregnant — when she and her unborn child died from pneumonia Jan. 13 in UPMC Mercy, according to the lawsuit filed by Shultz, her mother. It alleges that while Gillespie was serving a 30-day jail sentence, at least one guard ignored her request for help and the jail’s medical staff failed to diagnose her pneumonia early enough.
“Stick it out,” one guard told Gillespie when she asked for help three weeks before her death, the lawsuit states.
County officials do not comment on pending litigation, said Megan Dardanell, spokeswoman for County Executive Dan Onorato. Warden Ramon C. Rustin, one of 12 individual defendants listed along with the county and its jail health agency, could not be reached.
Shultz is not talking to reporters, Peirce said.
Gillespie nearly completed her original sentence for retail theft when she got pregnant, a violation of terms in her halfway house, Peirce said. She arrived in the jail Dec. 2, and though she complained to guards for weeks about breathing trouble and discharge from her lungs, she wasn’t sent to the infirmary until Dec. 29, according to the lawsuit.
The medical staff first diagnosed her problem as viral influenza. After three days, jail staff sent Gillespie to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed pneumonia and noted that the jail didn’t treat her fast enough, according to the lawsuit.
She was sedated and breathing with the help of tubes for nearly all of the two weeks she spent in the hospital before she died.
Peirce’s firm is involved in other jail litigation.
The county agreed to pay $3 million to settle a class action lawsuit that successfully challenged the constitutionality of strip-searching inmates held for minor offenses. The case, settled in September, is one of several issues at the jail in recent years, including problems with its health agency, Allegheny Correctional Health Services.
A 2007 audit by Controller Mark Patrick Flaherty showed that jail health costs more than doubled in four years and that ACHS failed to control costs. The jail’s medical staff was to diagnose major medical problems so that judges could consider early releases for people with conditions that would be expensive to treat.
Two jail employees were arrested last week in connection with an alleged assault on an inmate on Oct. 13. Another former inmate sued the county and a jail guard in federal court on Nov. 1, alleging the guard locked him in a cell with five men and watched while he was beaten and sodomized.
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