Dead-End Jail

She rammed a car while fleeing police in a stolen truck at 9 a.m. on May 9 along Martin Luther King Way South, seriously injuring a mother and critically injuring her 3-year-old son. Sabrina L. Owens felt like killing herself, and did. She was discovered six hours later in a King County Jail intake room, in her blue T-shirt and sweat pants, dangling from a cord she had ripped off a TV set. A jail guard says she was pronounced dead on the scene, then showed life signs. Comatose with brain damage from oxygen starvation, according to a medical report, she died officially at Harborview Medical Center two days later.

Owens, 36, is one of three inmates to have died in the 1,700-bed county jail this year. Or is she one of two to die there? For that matter, did she die in the jail at all? Likewise, five inmates died in the jail last year, or, again, was it just one or two? It depends on when and whom you ask. But this much seems clear: After averaging no more than one death annually from 2000 through 2002, 13 King County Jail inmates have died of suicide or natural or undetermined causes in the 26 months from May 2003 through July 2005. Jail officials, at first reluctant to release complete figures, insist they are low compared to other big-city jails. They have yet to implement full security measures to prevent another death like Owens', however, nor have they determined the circumstances of another apparent jail suicide this year.

(Getty Images / Don Tremain)

When I first learned of a publicly unreported death in the jail a few weeks back and asked officials how many inmates had died there this year, "one" was the response. Citing public-record exemptions, the jail would not release the inmate's name or any details of the death, pending release of a report when an investigation is complete. Interviews, court documents, and police and medical examiner reports, however, led to a bumbling gas-station robber named Ronald Hicks, 43, who once asked a court to kill him. This time, he apparently killed himself with a drug overdose. A custody officer then told me that the jail didn't count the deaths of inmates who die later in hospitals. So I asked officials how many inmates had died either in the jail or hospitals. "Two" became the official response—the second person, I later learned, being Owens, whose death is also still being investigated. I wrote a story (see "Unreported Jail Deaths," Aug. 10) and was invited by jail officials to tour the facility and learn about measures taken to prevent fatalities.

Riding up the elevator of the dimly lighted 19-year-old, 12-story lockup at Fifth Avenue and James Street in Seattle recently, escorted by no fewer than four corrections and health-department officials, I asked why they didn't include hospital deaths in their jail count. "We don't?" said one. "Sure we do," said another. "Who told you we don't?" said a third. It was a little uncomfortable, but I nodded to the jail information officer standing in the middle of them. He looked sheepish. "That's what they told me to say," he said, referring to higher-ups. As the elevator bumped along, Mark Bolton, deputy director of the county's Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, said he'd "check our official position on that." By the end of the tour, having consulted with other jail officials, he and the others agreed that while Owens was pronounced dead in the hospital, she was, like Hicks, who died in his cell, an official jail fatality and always was. A few days later, Bolton sent along a jail statistical chart. Since 1999 through this year, 20 inmates have died either in King County Jail custody or at a hospital—four in 1999, one in 2000, none in 2001, two in 2002, five in 2003, and five in 2004, including a Ballard man under home-detention supervision of the jail's Community Corrections Division, who hanged himself in his basement. There have been three in 2005.

I read that again. Three this year? The toll of "one" I was originally given had now become three? Between the May 11 death of Owens and the July 26 death of Hicks, it seems, another person had also died. It turned out the third inmate, an unnamed 55-year-old man, passed away in a hospital June 10 of complications from pancreatic cancer. His death did not appear to be suspicious or questionable. But why was it left off the earlier jail count I was given? "I am not sure where the 'disconnect' was on this or to whom you originally posed the question," Bolton told me. (I had posed the question to the jail spokesperson.) "I am thinking maybe there was confusion as to the question or maybe just an oversight. The correct number for 2005 is three, as noted in the report that was sent: one confirmed suicide [Owens], one pancreatic cancer [the unnamed man], and one still under review, awaiting toxicology results and determination from the medical examiner [Hicks]." Oddly, although Hicks' death was still being reviewed—and seems to mirror an earlier jail suicide attempt when he ingested as many as 150 pills—the statistical report Bolton sent me already stated that Hicks' death did not involve a suicide attempt.