Woman who died alone in jail 'just didn't seem that sick' to medical staff
The day before she died alone in her Oregon jail cell at age 26, Madaline Christine Pitkin was having trouble standing up and said in a written request for medical treatment that she felt “very close to death.”
In the form she was required to fill out, Pitkin also wrote: “Can’t hear, seeing lights, hearing voices. Please help me.”
She wrote four requests for medical treatment during the seven days she spent in a Washington County jail during April 2014. But to nine employees of a jail health care contractor, including a doctor—who either examined Pitkin or signed off on her care—she ‘just didn’t seem that sick,” as one nurse later told investigators, reports the Oregonian in a lengthy article.
Pitkin was a heroin addict who wound up at the jail after initially being pulled over in a traffic stop. She had a hearing the day she was arrested in which she pleaded not guilty to a heroin possession charge, the newspaper reports. She was provided with withdrawal medication by medical workers. However, her medical requests stated: “Can’t keep meds, food, liquids down” and “Heart beating so hard that I can’t sleep.” She also complained she was having trouble standing up.
Dr. Melissa Weimer, an Oregon Health & Science University physician who apparently was not involved in Pitkin’s treatment, said withdrawal normally isn’t life-threatening if symptoms are brought under control early on.
However, intravenous fluids may be needed for those who can’t keep anything down for a day and a half, the doctor told the Oregonian, and those in withdrawal should start feeling better after a few days.
The day before her death, Pitkin was sent to a jail medical ward. A doctor had ordered that her blood pressure be taken regularly, but there are no records to show that this occurred. In the only discipline that the newspaper found concerning Pitkin’s case, a nurse was reprimanded for failing to carry out the doctor’s order.
Her parents, Mary and Russell Pitkin, say they were told by an assistant county prosecutor that he couldn’t pursue criminal charges over their daughter’s death because too many people were involved. They plan to file a civil lawsuit.
They had wanted to visit their daughter in jail, but she didn’t put them on a visitors list as required. A card sent by Mary Pitkin to her daughter telling her that she loved her and mentioning that she had put money in her commissary account, hoping for a call, was returned a couple of days after the young woman’s death, the Oregonian says.
Although Pitkin had provided full names, dates of birth and social security numbers for herself and her husband, as required, she had violated a jail rule by failing to put her full name on the return address portion of the envelope, the article explains.
“Just a missed connection,” Russell Pitkin told the newspaper. “Pretty heartbreaking.”
Related coverage:
Oregonian: “Jail inmate described feeling ‘near death’ twice before she collapsed in cell”
