Louisiana Voice

Private prisons operated by LaSalle Corrections of Ruston have seen more than their share of problems – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that inmates of the jails have seen more than their share of abuse and neglect at the hands of LaSalle.

We have already published stories about the treatment and agonizing deaths of MICHAEL SABBIE and HOLLY BARLOW-AUSTIN and before that, the sordid whistleblower complaint about unwanted HYSTERECTOMIES  being performed on female detainees without their consent at a LaSalle-run facility in Georgia.

In one case in Texarkana, negligence led to a LaSalle employee pleading guilty to manslaughter.

LaSalle, operated by an ordained Methodist minister and headquartered in Ruston, operates nine private prisons under contracts with local sheriffs in Louisiana. Those facilities and their bed counts include:

• Catahoula Correctional Center in Harrisonburg (835 beds);
• Jackson Parish Correctional Center in Jonesboro (1252);
• LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla (755);
• Madison Parish Correctional Center in Tallulah (334);
• Madison Parish Detention Center in Tallulah (264);
• Madison Parish LTCW (formerly the Louisiana Transitional Center for Women) in Tallulah (535);
• River Correctional Center in Ferriday (602);
• Southern Correctional Center in Tallulah (564);
• Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield (1576).

And while LouisianaVoice will be examining some of the Louisiana facilities in this series, there is yet another wrongful death lawsuit involving the Bi-State Jail in Texarkana, the same facility where Sabbie and Austin met their deaths. Because Texarkana sits on the Texas-Arkansas line, and parts of the city rest in each of the states, the jail takes prisoners from both jurisdictions.

On June 28, 2016, Morgan Angerbauer, a Type I diabetic, was arrested by Texarkana, Arkansas, police on an outstanding warrant related to a non-violent drug offense. She was transported to Bi-State where she was placed in a cell.

Because she had been previously incarcerated at the jail, medical records there noted her diabetic condition. At 11:15 a.m. on June 29, her blood sugar was tested on an Accu-Chek blood-testing device which indicated her blood sugar was above the testing range of 55 mg/dl, meaning her blood sugar was four-to-five times higher than normal. She was administered 15 units of injectable insulin but was not given any intravenous fluids.

At 1:45 p.m., her blood sugar still registered 487 mg/dl and she was given another 10 units of injectable insulin but again, no intravenous fluids. At 2:35 p.m., her blood sugar was 178 and she was not tested again until nearly 13 hours later, at 3:20 a.m. on June 30 when it again tested high.

She was given another 15 units of insulin and no intravenous fluids and was tested again at 5:30 a.m., again registering high. She was not tested again until 10:30 a.m., when her blood sugar was shown to be 74. No follow-up test was done to ensure the result was accurate.

At 4:30 p.m., duty nurse Tiffany Venable wrote that she “refused” to test her blood sugar and Venable left her shift without requiring a test. It should be noted that Venable was also a defendant in the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Michael Sabbie, which was eventually settled before trial.

Less than an hour later, at 5:15 p.m. Angerbauer began beating on her cell door and pleading to be tested, pleas that were ignored, according to the LAWSUIT filed by Victoria Leigh, administrator of Angerbauer’s estate.

Angerbauer spent the next several hours pounding on her cell door and pleading for a blood sugar test, all to no avail, until at 4 a.m. on July 1, a jail trustee called for help when she was observed apparently unconscious on the medical observation cell floor. It had been more than 17 hours since her blood sugar had last been tested.

Licensed vocational nurse Brittany Johnson, a named defendant in the lawsuit, attempted to take a blood sugar reading at 4:14 a.m. and received a reading of “E-3” on multiple tests, a reading that means the patient’s blood sugar is extremely high.

Yet, surveillance camera video shows that it was another 40 minutes before Johnson began CPR or calling 911. During that time, Johnson “inexplicably gave Ms. Angerbauer glucose rather than insulin,” the lawsuit says, noting that glucose “causes blood sugar levels to rise, not fall.

Within minutes, Angerbauer was dead. The state crime lab attributed the cause of death to diabetic ketoacidosis. Her blood sugar at the time of her death was 813.

As in the Sabbie litigation, in which training shortcuts by LaSalle were revealed to be the norm, the Angerbauer lawsuit also shone a harsh spotlight on LaSalle in the aftermath of her death.

“LaSalle performed an ‘internal investigation’ into Ms. Angerbauer’s death in which defendant Johnson fabricated a story that omitted her refusal to test Ms. Angerbauer’s blood sugar between 5:15 p.m. on June 30 and when Ms. Angerbauer was found unresponsive on July 1, 2016.

“LaSalle employee signed off on Johnson’s report,” the suit claims. “The entire ‘internal investigation’ took about an hour, contained no attempts by investigators to compare statements to the video evidence. This resulted in LaSalle employees signing off on investigative reports that contain outright fabrications that attempted to absolve LaSalle and all its personnel of any liability.” (emphasis mine)

“Multiple LaSalle employees, including defendant Johnson, made false written statements that defendant Johnson entered the medical observation cell at 4:40 a.m. on July 1, 2016. As noted…she entered the cell at 4:14 a.m. and did not call for an ambulance to be summoned until almost 5 a.m., some 46 minutes later. Multiple LaSalle employees falsely state the time line in an unlawful attempt to protect defendants from liability in this matter.

“Defendant Johnson’s report (as well as other statements of LaSalle employees) was contradicted by the Texarkana, Arkansas Police Department investigation of Ms. Angerbauer’s death, which ultimately led to the arrest of Johnson on charges of negligent homicide,” the petition says, adding that Johnson entered a guilty plea to negligent homicide in November 2017.

Texarkana attorney David Carter, who represents Leigh in the lawsuit and who represents Barlow-Austin’s mother and husband in their lawsuit, claims in Leigh’s petition that the failure to secure medical care for Angerbauer “was motivated by unconstitutionally impermissible profit-driven reasons. The corporate defendants (LaSalle entities Southwestern Correctional, dba LaSalle Corrections, LaSalle Management and LaSalle Southwest Corrections) also failed to train their corporate nursing staff concerning contacting emergency medical services in a timely manner when a patient had become unresponsive…”

The lawsuit said the need for training was even more acute because “LaSalle staff(s) the Bi-State Jail with licensed vocational nurses rather than registered nurses and it was foreseeable that such training deficiencies would cause harm to inmates/detainees.”

Moreover, as with the Sabbie litigation, the Angerbauer lawsuit said that an investigation by local law enforcement officials “revealed that LaSalle employees pre-completed the cell check log for the medical observation cell. According to the document, LaSalle staff was logging cell checks on Ms. Angerbauer two hours after she died. This is yet another example of the corporate defendants’ pattern, practice and custom of falsifying records…”

The lawsuit says that LaSalle “negligently contracted with a doctor who was located over a two-hour drive away from Bi-State Jail; who did not oversee medical treatment at Bi-State Jail in any meaningful way; who did not have control or supervisory ability over any of the nursing staff at Bi-State Jail; and who was inadequate to fulfill the requirement that LaSalle maintain a contract with a doctor for medical car at Bi-State Jail.”