A woman gave birth alone in a jail cell after her cries for help were ignored, lawsuit says
Diana Sanchez screamed as she writhed on the small bed inside her cell at the Denver County Jail. Gripping the thin mattress with one hand, she tried to use the other to take off her white cloth pants, only managing to free her left leg. Her face glistened with sweat. She had been in labor for hours, and now her baby was coming.
At 10:44 a.m. on July 31, 2018, in a moment captured on surveillance video, Sanchez gave birth to her son alone in her cell without medical supervision or treatment, despite repeatedly telling the jail’s staff that she was having contractions, according to a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Colorado on Wednesday. The suit alleges that instead of “ensuring that Ms. Sanchez was able to give birth in a safe and sanitary medical setting,” nurses and deputies “callously made her labor alone for hours,” forcing her to endure a “horrific experience.”
“That pain was indescribable,” Sanchez told KDVR in an interview last year, “and what hurts me more though is the fact that nobody cared.”
The suit, which names the city and county of Denver, Denver Health Medical Center and six individuals as defendants, comes months after an internal investigation conducted by the Denver Sheriff Department cleared its deputies of wrongdoing — a result that left Sanchez’s attorney, Mari Newman, “profoundly disappointed.”
“That’s just emblematic of how broken the system really is,” Newman told The Washington Post. “They claim to have done a review and their conclusion is that nothing was wrong with the fact that a woman was never taken to the hospital and ended up giving birth in a dirty, cold, hard jail cell. It’s really unfathomable.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nobody-cared-a-woman-gave-birth-alone-in-a-jail-cell-after-her-cries-for-help-were-ignored-lawsuit-says/ar-AAGv0U0?li=BBnb7Kz
= new reply since forum marked as read
