The African-American man who couldn't pay $100 bail starved to death in US jail: Lawsuit

The family of an African-American man who starved to death in an Arkansas jail because he was unable to pay his $100 bail sued Sebastian County, which runs the detention center where the man died. The lawsuit accused the jail and its medical provider of criminal neglect.    

Larry Eugene Price Jr., 51, died at the Sebastian County Detention Center in August 2021, after his medication was taken away and he had to eat his own feces and drink his own urine, according to Newsweek.  

He was held for a little over a year at the jail awaiting trial on a terroristic threatening charge, a felony, while he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD.

The man was arrested on August 19, 2020, for using his finger like a gun to point around the station and at police officers, who in return arrested him on terroristic threatening in the first degree. He wasn't an immediate threat. He had no real weapon.

Price had a history of serious mental illness - including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Despite that, he had been held in solitary confinement at the county facility, according to the lawsuit.

Price then went before a judge who set bond at $1,000.  He would have been free with $100 for bail, but he was penniless. After that, everything went wrong for him. He lost his mind and health. His weight dropped drastically from 185 pounds to 90 pounds. He died after a year.

He was found in a solitary confinement cell with his eyes wide open, naked, starved, dried saliva on the corners of his mouth, Newsweek reported.

Even after his death, the jail monitors continued to give reports stating that he was, “OK.”

"I was appalled – a developmentally disabled, mentally ill man, who couldn't afford his low bail amount, was held in solitary confinement for a year," said Erik Heipt, a Seattle attorney with Budge & Heipt PLLC representing the Price family in a 29-page civil rights and wrongful death lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in Arkansas.

"He was not serving a sentence," Heipt told Newsweek. "He was awaiting trial the whole time — for a crime that he wasn't mentally capable of committing. Even if you put everything else aside, this alone is a travesty of justice... There is no excuse for an atrocity like this."

"This case represents everything that's wrong with the cash bail system," Heipt said. "It punishes the poor. He was essentially jailed for being in a mental health crisis. He didn't hurt anyone. If anything, he was the one who needed help. Instead of getting him that help, they took him to jail and locked him in solitary confinement for a year. This was a colossal systemic breakdown."

Jail staff also discontinued Price's mental health medications after he refused to take them, the lawsuit said.

“Larry Price suffered in the tortured throes of his untreated mental disorder for months on end as jail healthcare and security staff watched him waste away-apathetic to his life-threatening medical and mental health needs and to the cruelty of his confinement,” the lawsuit said.

According to the lawsuit, inspections at the jail over the years identified problems such as overcrowding, understaffing and inadequate space at the county facility.

Sebastian County Sheriff Hobe Runion said that an internal probe of Price's death was underway.

On Monday, Runion denied the allegations in the complaint. He outrageously suggested Price might have died of COVID "during a time when COVID was killing a lot of people" but making no reference to the findings in the autopsy specifically listing the manner of death as malnutrition and dehydration.

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