Larry Price Jr.

Larry Eugene Price Jr. lived in Fort Smith, AR, often unhoused. He was close with his family and often spoke to his younger brother, Rodney, a corrections employee in California. “He was very loveful,” Rodney told the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, of his brother. “He loved to be loved.”

Price experienced paranoid schizophrenia and a developmental disability and had a long history of mental illnesses, according to a lawsuit filed by his estate. In August 2020, he was arrested during an acute mental health crisis. Unable to afford a $100 bond deposit, he spent a year in jail, mostly in solitary confinement. His weight fell from 185 pounds to about 90 pounds. On January 8, 2021, he submitted a medical request form stating, “I am sick and have lost alot [sic] of weight I need to see a doctor," but he did not receive the help he required, the lawsuit alleged.

Price was "so visibly emaciated that he resembled a victim of famine," according to the lawsuit. Thousands of “wellbeing checks” by staff failed to note his deterioration over the months. Jail staff continued to log wellbeing checks in the hours and minutes leading up to his death on August 29, 2021, even though, the lawsuit alleged, “Mr. Price was visibly malnourished, dying of starvation and dehydration, and laying in a cell saturated with standing water and urine.”

“He looked like a starving third-world baby,” Rodney Price told the Lab, after viewing autopsy photographs of his brother, “or like someone who’d been deliberately tortured and starved.”

Rodney asserted that his brother’s death was highly preventable. “Who is going to hold them accountable?” he asked, of the authorities involved. “The state? No. The feds? No. The only one who is working to hold them accountable is my attorney and myself.”

Turn Key Health Clinics, now called TK Health, told the Lab it would be “inaccurate” to claim that Price “died of causes tied to starvation or dehydration.” They acknowledged providing “medical care and a weekly psychiatric clinic” at the jail, but asserted that another provider had been responsible for Price’s mental health care, resulting in “Price’s untimely, tragic outcome.” TK health agreed to a $3 million settlement in the civil lawsuit; Sebastian County, too, agreed to pay $3 million to settle the case.

“Gosh, it’s horrible,” Sebastian County Sheriff Hobe Runion told the Lab, of Price’s death. “It’s horrendous, and I can’t make excuses.”

Runion felt strongly that the most important changes needed to prevent deaths like Price’s come at the front end, before someone like Price is arrested and made to languish in solitary confinement. “There is a lot of blame to go around for Price’s death. We’ve taken ours, and the medical provider took theirs,” Runion said, referring to the settlements. “But the state of Arkansas should take the blame, too, because they haven’t put funding into mental health. If we don’t pay up front, we pay on the back end. It’s the most frustrating aspect of being a sheriff.”

A full account of the lawsuit—including the estate’s allegations against Turn Key Health Clinics, Sebastian County and others, as well as each party’s response—is available through PACER (Case 2:23-cv-02008, Western District of Arkansas).

• IN THE NEWS (Warning: Disturbing Contents)
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• LITIGATION (Warning: Disturbing Contents)
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