By Michelle Theriault Boots
Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
ANCHORAGE —The primary cause of death for a 53-year-old man who died while being restrained by Anchorage jail guards last year was asphyxia, a state review found.
The state will not prosecute correctional officers who restrained Jeffrey Foreman in the midst of an apparent mental health episode at the jail July 13, an investigation by the state’s Office of Special Prosecutions concluded.
“The force the correctional officers used while restraining Mr. Foreman amounted to non-deadly force,” the Office of Special Prosecutions investigation concluded. “Although the force used by the correctional officers resulted in Mr. Foreman’s death,” it didn’t rise to the level of “deadly force” as defined under Alaska law, the office’s Chief Assistant Attorney General Jenna Gruenstein wrote in a letter to the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, the agency responsible for probing deaths in jails and prisons.
Foreman’s death was the first time a person in an Alaska jail or prison has died while being restrained by officers since the 2015 death of Larry Kobuk, who was 33.
The Alaska Department of Corrections said the report vindicated the actions of officers.
“The OSP report is very clear on several critical points: There was no evidence that the correctional officers intended to cause Mr. Foreman’s death, nor that they engaged in circumstances they should have known would cause his death or serious physical injury,” wrote spokesperson Betsy Holley in an email. “It also notes several contributing medical and physiological factors that played a role in the outcome.”
The department also conducted an internal review of the incident. The findings are confidential, Holley said.
“When internal reviews identify policy or training needs — we address them,” she wrote.
A regular jail stay, and then a quick decline
Foreman, who was from Texas but had been living in Alaska for years, was arrested July 6 on suspicion of driving under the influence and third-degree assault. It wasn’t the first time: He had spent stints in jail before, always for trouble that happened when he’d been drinking, said his mother, Patsy McMillan.
McMillan, who lives in Houston, Texas, spoke regularly with her son during the six days he was in jail last July. The last time was the afternoon of July 10 , when she posted his $250 bail.
On the phone that day, he sounded “upbeat,” McMillan said.
Only hours later, things would go terribly wrong.
“I question the phone call now,” she said. “Should I have asked more questions?”
Even with his bail paid, Foreman wasn’t immediately released because he needed to be fitted with GPS electronic monitoring equipment by the pretrial enforcement division. That was scheduled for the next morning, Friday, July 11.
Around 9 p.m. , things began to spiral: A correctional officer had a normal conversation with Foreman, but just 15 minutes later he “began exhibiting signs of confusion” talking to a different officer, the investigation found.
Soon, Foreman was talking about guys with “hats and baseball bats” and rambling about escaping from a “secret door” in the wall of his cell. A correctional officer told other staff that Foreman appeared to be hallucinating, and was told to write a mental health referral and that medical staff would be notified.
A cellmate later told investigators it was “obvious Foreman was having a mental health episode.”
Escalation
Over the next hours, the situation escalated: Foreman yelled that he needed to get out of his cell, kicked the door and tried to pull a toilet off the wall, according to the review. He got in his cellmate’s face yelling, and eventually struck the man. That’s when guards swarmed the area, calling for backup.
Foreman remained aggressive and wasn’t following commands, according to the report.
Eventually, officers forced Foreman to the concrete floor in an attempt to put him in restraints. During a struggle in which Foreman was face down on the floor, the officers tried maneuvers like a “figure-four leg lock” and kneeled on Foreman’s shoulder.
At one point while he was being kneeled on, Foreman said he couldn’t breathe, the report found. The officer said he removed pressure, but reapplied his knee when Foreman tried to kick at someone.
As soon as the officers got Foreman into the restraints, he stopped resisting. The guards “determined he was unresponsive and appeared to be in distress, including that he was turning blue.”
After 15 minutes of CPR, he was declared dead.
Cause of death undetermined
An autopsy by the state medical examiner found Foreman’s manner of death to be undetermined, rather than an accident, homicide or suicide.
The autopsy lists the cause of death as “right hemothorax and hemopericardium findings consistent with asphyxia” due to “fractures of multiple right ribs with abrasion injuries of heart and right lung” and “blunt impacts of thorax (cardiopulmonary resuscitation/compression of thorax during restraint).”
The report also mentioned cardiovascular disease caused by alcoholism and acute fatty liver as contributing factors.
Foreman died due to the force used by correctional officers, but they did not use force that was meant to be deadly, the prosecutorial review found.
The officers were legally entitled to use non-deadly force to restrain Foreman because he was lashing out at his cellmate and the officers, the report found. The restraint described by the witnesses and in a video “does not appear to be unreasonable in light of the circumstances.”
“Despite the tragic result, there is no evidence that the force used by any of the correctional officers exceeded that of non-deadly force in their actions in restraining Mr. Foreman,” Gruenstein concluded.
McMillan, Foreman’s mother, has been absorbing the reality of her son’s death. Having read the investigation reports, she has questions about the apparent mental health episode her son had entered into when the scene grew chaotic and officers restrained him.
It almost made her feel better to know he was having a mental episode, though the reason is unclear to her. McMillan said there was no sign of intoxicants in his system according to the autopsy report. He may have been in alcohol withdrawal, having a severe history of alcoholism.
Whatever happened, it seems to have happened suddenly, she said.
“He’s not the only one,” she said. “There’s probably hundreds of people in the jail who are going through mental problems, and all the years of drugs and alcohol probably exacerbated it.”
McMillan also has questions about the force with which her son was restrained, which the legal review found to be justified but at least one witness described as “swarming” or “dog-piling” Foreman.
In Texas, she performs as a clown. In her clowning persona, McMillan makes weekly visits to hospitals to cheer patients. She’s even visited prisons for events where children can see their incarcerated parents, though she’s not sure she could stomach such a visit anymore.
Every Thursday after her clowning visit to the hospital, she’d call her son as she drove home through Houston traffic. He’d struggled with addiction for so long but they still had moments of connection, especially on those calls.
“We talked the Bible all the time,” she said. “We would pray about people and things like that. In his good moments, he was good.”
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