BY COLLEEN KEANE
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
ALBUQUERQUE – When Felicia Herder went to look for her older brother, Harrison Mann Begay, with her mom and brother at the Montezuma County Police Department in Cortez, Colo., she didn’t think it would be the last time she would see him. But she could tell he needed immediate medical help and asked the officer in charge to take him to the hospital.
The family had driven to Cortez from their home in Tonalea, Ariz., because they had learned that Begay had been arrested for trespassing and public intoxication.
The officer denied Herder’s plea, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the family last month in the U.S. District Court in Denver.
Early the next morning, October 27, 2013, Begay died in jail from alcohol poisoning and potential complications from a head injury, according to the complaint.
Begay was 38 years old when he died, according to Herder.
“It was a wrongful death,” said Herder.
These events and others are detailed in the 40-page lawsuit filed last month by the family’s attorney, Russell Sacks, of Albuquerque.
Defendants in the case are Dennis Spruell, the Montezuma County Sheriff at the time; Montezuma County Commission, several deputies, a nurse from the sheriff’s office, the Southwest Memorial Hospital and Dr. Todd Fowler, an emergency-medicine physician.
Besides denying Herder’s request that Begay receive medical attention before he was hauled off to jail, the lawsuit claims that hospital personnel were well aware that Begay had life-threatening medical needs, because he had been at the hospital twice in the previous two days.
On both occasions, Begay registered near-lethal levels of blood alcohol content and trauma to the head, according to the lawsuit.
“(Todd) Fowler, the doctor in charge of the ER (emergency room), recklessly and willfully failed to provide a higher level of medical care, even though it was available,” Sacks wrote in the lawsuit.
Sacks added that on the second visit to the hospital, Begay was “cursorily” treated for 10 minutes by hospital personnel in the back of a police car.
“Fowler negligently treated Mr. Begay by only placing an arm band on his left wrist and taking his vital signs,” Sacks stated.
Reflecting on her brother’s life, Herder said that he was always there for her, his kids, mom, family and friends when he was at home in Tonalea.
“He was a family man. He did everything for my family,” said Herder, referring to how he fixed mechanical things around the house and repaired cars and trucks when they broke down.
“He taught me everything,” she said mentioning that she learned how to speak the Navajo language, herd sheep and ride horses from Begay’s guidance.
As a single father, with the help of his mom, grandma and siblings, he also raised his seven children: two girls and five boys, ages 22 to 10, according to Herder.
“We miss him. It is really tough on my mom,” she said.
According to the lawsuit, the last time Elizabeth Begay saw her son, he was lying unconscious and bleeding from the head, half on and off a makeshift cart in the booking area of the Cortez police department.
The lawsuit claims that standard care should have included: obtaining IV access to correct electrolyte abnormalities; determining risk of aspiration, clearing out his stomach, and/ or transferring him to the closest detox center located in Durango, Colo.
“The death of Mr. Begay is an example of the systemic problem of defendants’ failure to provide adequate medical attention to a Navajo citizen who was known to be suffering from an acute alcohol episode,” wrote Sacks, who referred to this practice as “patient dumping”.
Additionally, according to the lawsuit, Fowler failed to obtain Begay’s “informed” consent for discharge from the hospital because Begay wasn’t in a frame of mind to be able to make such a decision and as a fluent Navajo language speaker, he wasn’t provided with an interpreter.
It’s not the first time deaths have occurred in the Montezuma County jail. According to a Cortez Journal news report, two other inmates died in jail in 2013 and a 43-year-old woman died in her cell last month.
One of the only safety nets for alcohol and drug dependent people in Cortez is The Bridge Emergency Homeless Shelter. Located near the jail, The Bridge provides individual sleeping rooms, laundry and bath facilities, along with meals and educational groups.
“We have a wide welcome mat. We don’t want anyone freezing to death,” said Laurie Knutson, the shelter’s executive director.
Knutson added that The Bridge serves a need that reaches around 290 people a year, including many members of the Navajo and Ute Mountain Ute Tribes.
But, she added, the community needs a detox center that can provide medical treatment and care.
“In my opinion, (The Bridge) is used as a de-facto detox center, and we are not (that),” she said.
Sheriff Steve Nowlin, who took office in January 2015, replacing Dennis Spruel, one of the defendants in the lawsuit, said that he’s already started a conversation about setting up a detox center with the new director of the Southwest Memorial Hospital and plans to reach out to the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Nation and nearby communities for help.
“We have to do the right thing before it gets worse. We (in government) are supposed to protect people. We need to get stakeholders involved in this. We can all work together to get this done,” he said.
“Intervention could make a difference (in saving lives),” said Melanie Yazzie, a member of The Red Nation, an organization that advocates for Native Americans experiencing human rights violations.
“We support Harrison Begay’s family in their efforts to find justice and change the landscape of health care for Native American people. I think there needs to be wide-spread pressure to (make change),” she added.
Haley Leonard, a spokesperson for the Southwest Memorial Hospital, said that she could not comment because of the pending lawsuit.
Based on an excerpt from the lawsuit, another hospital spokesperson wrote Herder, “We are unable to find any correlation between Mr. Begay’s passing and the care he received at Southwest Memorial Hospital, Inc.” The lawsuit requests a jury trial of six persons and an amount over $75,000. Sacks declined to comment.
SUBMITTED
Harrison Mann Begay, 38, died at the Montezuma County Police Department in Cortez, Colo., from alcohol poisoning and potential complications from a head injury, according to a complaint. These events and others are detailed in the 40-page lawsuit filed last month by the family’s attorney, Russell Sacks, of Albuquerque.