A settlement appears near in a federal lawsuit filed by the estate of a mentally ill man who starved to death in the Sebastian County jail in Fort Smith.
County Judge Steve Hotz said Thursday that the Sebastian County Quorum Court approved an appropriation of up to $3 million to settle the county’s portion of the lawsuit filed over the Aug. 29, 2021, death of Larry Eugene Price Jr.
Hotz said the vote Tuesday night was unanimous.
Price, 51, was an indigent man who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had an IQ of less than 55, according to the lawsuit filed last year. He had been jailed for more than a year because he couldn’t pay the $100 bail while he awaited trial for pointing finger “guns” at Fort Smith police.
During that time, the lawsuit complaint tells a horrific story of man who ate his own feces, drank his own urine and greatly needed mental health care. By the time he was found unresponsive on the jail floor in a pool of toilet water and urine, his weight had dropped from 185 pounds to 90 pounds.
Hank Balson, one of the Seattle attorneys representing the Price estate, said Friday that attorneys “are working closely with the defendants on the the terms of a settlement.
“It’s not complete yet” but is getting closer, he said.
Court records indicate that attorneys held a settlement conference in the lawsuit on July 8. The next day the case was reassigned in U.S. District Court in Fort Smith from Judge P.K. Holmes III to Judge Timothy L. Brooks.
In addition to Sebastian County, other defendants are Turn Key Health Clinics LLC, an Oklahoma-based corporation that was contracted to provide physical and mental health care to inmates at the jail; Turn Key’s chief mental health officer at the time; a Turn Key nurse who was responsible for providing physical health care to the inmates; and numerous jail employees and others.
A phone message left Friday for one of the Price estate’s attorneys was not immediately returned.
