Elliott Williams
- Age: 37
- Name of Jail: David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center
- Location: Tulsa, OK
- Cause of Death*: Complications of vertebro-spinal injuries; evidence of dehydration
- Incarceration Type: Pre-trial detention
- Private Company: Correctional Healthcare Companies (now Wellpath)
- Incarceration Duration: About six days
- Date of Death: October 27, 2011
On October 21, 2011, Elliott Williams, 37, was arrested while having a mental health crisis in a hotel lobby in Oklahoma. According to a report from a correctional medical expert, Williams was initially detained at the Owasso City Jail, where he displayed clear signs of psychosis. A lawsuit later filed by Williams’s estate alleged that law enforcement “took no action to protect Mr. Williams from harm,” despite evidence that he was suffering from serious mental illness and had injured himself, including by “repeatedly slamming his head” against the door and walls of his video-monitored holding cell “with great force.”
In the early morning of October 22, Williams was transported from the city jail to the Tulsa County Jail, where he continued to act erratically and exhibited symptoms “consistent with a serious brain injury,” according to the lawsuit. He was placed in a holding cell, where, according to the medical expert’s report, he once again rammed his head into the cell door and fell to the ground, after which point he was no longer observed to walk or stand. But jail and medical staff did not transport him to a hospital or mental health facility, the lawsuit alleged.
A nurse indicated that she thought Williams was faking his injury. Despite Williams’s complaints of being unable to move, “he was not able to reach food placed in his cell and as a consequence didn’t eat and appeared not to be able to lift his head to drink,” according to the medical expert’s report. He was examined briefly by a psychiatrist who “essentially orders nothing but observation with an apparent intent of catching Mr. Williams in his faking of his paralysis,” the medical expert’s report continued. On October 24 or 25, he was placed in a video-monitored “suicide cell,” according to the lawsuit. He died there on October 27.
According to Williams’s autopsy report, he died of “complications of vertebro-spinal injuries,” though the medical examiner also noted evidence of dehydration. A medical expert who reviewed the case for the plaintiff’s side noted that Williams was “never provided with any meaningful assistance in obtaining adequate fluid, nutrition, pain control, meaningful evaluation, diagnosis or treatment of his complaints.”
"I believe this is the civil rights violation of our lifetime," Daniel Smolen, the family's attorney, told the Lab, referring to cases like Williams’s. "I get calls every single week about jail deaths."
In response to the Lab’s request for comment, Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado stated: “I was not the Sheriff during that incident so I don’t think I have a comment regarding it.” An official answer to the lawsuit, filed by then-Sheriff Stanley Glanz in federal court, can be found here.
Lawyers who represented Correctional Healthcare Companies did not respond to the Lab’s request for comment.
A full account of the lawsuit—including the estate’s allegations against Correctional Healthcare Companies, the Tulsa County sheriff and others, as well as each party’s response—is available through PACER (Case 4:11-cv-00720, Northern District of Oklahoma).