Attorneys for the family said the deputies and jail medical staff members who looked on as Christian Black sat slumped in a restraint chair should be criminally charged in his death.
“There was no sense of urgency,” said his father, Kenya Black. “You could clearly see he was unconscious.”
Black, 25, of Zanesville, died on March 26, two days after he was taken from the Montgomery County jail to a hospital in Dayton. He was in the jail after police said he crashed a stolen car.
The county coroner’s office said last week that Black likely died from positional asphyxia, which happens when the chest can’t expand, starving the body of oxygen. His death, which is still under investigation, was ruled a homicide by the coroner.
I once saw a guys breathing rate shoot to 36 while in ambulatories after about a week in the chair. Don’t get me wrong he needed that amount of restraint he was so manic he was screaming incomprehensibly and trying to ram his head into walls so hard it shook the unit 24/7 despite getting sedatives that should have taken down a horse but the entire night shift staff had been telling dayshift he needed a chest xray for almost that entire time (standalone psych hospital, radiology wasn’t there overnight). Every once in a while his breathing just sounded… chunky. We didn’t like it but the lead psychiatrist dgaf.
Anyway he lived without any long term complications but only because we caught it the second it happened and we got him on oxygen and airlifted to the university right away (this was up in the mountains). And I shit you not afterwards a coworker said they still thought he was exaggerating like the University would have admitted an extremely violent psych patient to ICU without radiologic confirmation. Somebody said something similar about a patient who stroked out on me and that personally I watched them give tpa to right there on the CT table after confirmation of ischemia when I briefly worked a COVID psych unit.
And this was psych where people at least slightly care about the patients. I get so many correctional offers (that first one was actually a forensic psych unit) and I love love LOVE that patient population but I could barely handle how the psych unit treated those people I don’t think I could handle corrections. Even just that one guy my hair almost started falling out watching him breathe for a week straight. I was still a technician at the time so I was just there sitting 1:1 with him for hours at a time retaking his respiratory rate every 15 minutes and also every time it sounded chunky again and again and again (when you do care, they burn you out).