“How are you talking to me if you’re having a seizure?” a guard allegedly asked hours before 31-year-old Callen Lines’s death.
A California man has filed a lawsuit against the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, claiming that his adult daughter died within hours of intake at Las Colinas Women’s Detention Center.
According to The Times of San Diego, 31-year-old Callen Lines was found unresponsive in her cell at about 7:30 p.m. on May 12. Paramedics took Lines to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead upon arrival. A postmortem examination suggests that Lines most likely died from a lethal combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine. Lines had been arrested a day earlier on suspicion of theft.
Lines’s father, Dano McCarthy, said he knows his daughter was battling addiction at the time of her arrest—but wants to know how and why she left Las Colinas in an ambulance less than 36 hours after being detained.
The lawsuit alleges that Lines spent roughly one-and-a-half days in Las Colinas before a guard and cellmate found her slumped over a chair in front of her cell door. In court documents, McCarthy claims that Lines had placed herself in that position while desperately pleading for help. These pleas were heard but allegedly ignored, with guards accusing Lines of exaggerating her symptoms or otherwise “lying.”
“I was always worried that I’d get that phone call that she died,” McCarthy told CBS News 8 in September. “I didn’t expect it to happen while she was in custody.”
The lawsuit states that, during intake on May 11, Lines told a nurse at Las Colinas that she would most likely experience substance-related withdrawal symptoms. More specifically, Lines said that she consumed about a gram of fentanyl per day; Lines was also a habitual drinker.
“Although [defendants] ordered medications for Ms. Lines, [they] made no attempt to have a nurse administer them to Ms. Lines immediately,” the lawsuit alleges.
While the intake nurse had prescribed medication to ease the effects of opioid withdrawal, Lines never received it. Instead, she was given over-the-counter acetaminophen and an anti-seizure medication.
“This time her blood pressure was 160/90,” the lawsuit alleges. “This reading is significantly elevated and is associated with a high risk of heart attack, stroke, or seizure. Aside from documenting the vitals, [the nurse] failed to provide additional care, failed to take Ms. Lines to the medical clinic for additional evaluation, and failed to notify the charge nurse that Ms. Lines’ vitals were dangerously elevated.”
Lines’s health continued to deteriorate, with another inmate claiming that the 31-year-old had spent much of that time yelling and screaming for help. One of Lines’s cellmates said that she personally saw Lines repeatedly request assistance through an intercom, telling a guard that she was having a seizure and needed immediate medical attention.
“How are you talking to me if you’re having a seizure?” the guard allegedly said in response.
San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez has since said that Lines explicitly refused treatment.
“It’s important for me to acknowledge [Dano McCarthy’s] pain,” Martinez said in a statement. “I mean, as apparent, I can’t imagine—and going so long not really knowing what happened.”
Having said that, though, Martinez seemed to suggest that Lines would have received treatment if she’d asked for it.
“Part of what people don’t understand, too, is when people come into custody, they don’t lose their constitutional rights,” Martinez said. “Which means they have a right to decide what medical care they want or what treatment they want, what they’re going to tell us or not tell us.”
The McCarthy family has questioned this narrative, noting that Lines had been brought to Las Colinas several weeks before her death; during that visit, Lines accepted treatment for opioid withdrawal and survived.
Sources
Family of woman who died at Santee jail files wrongful death lawsuit
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