‘Please help me.’ Inmate begged for help before jail staff let him die, lawsuit says
A Minnesota man has filed a federal lawsuit after he says jail staff failed to provide medical care to his son, leading to his death.
On July 18, 2022, 41-year-old Lucas Bellamy was arrested and taken to the Hennepin County Jail. In the days that followed, Bellamy would plead with jail employees for help. Three days late he was dead.
When Bellamy was booked into the jail, he informed the staff that he had swallowed a bag of drugs. He was taken to an emergency room at a local hospital, where he was sedated and monitored for several hours before being sent back to the jail, according to the lawsuit.
Hospital staff ordered that Bellamy be monitored and returned to the emergency room if any new symptoms showed up, the lawsuit said.
In the next few days, Bellamy began to develop new symptoms and could barely stand, according to the lawsuit.
On the morning of July 20, just after midnight, Bellamy became very ill and began vomiting. He was then moved from general population to a single-person cell, the lawsuit said.
Court records say Bellamy was barely eating and declining meals. That evening, his condition worsened. When a nurse came to check on him, he was complaining of stomach pain and could barely stand up, causing him to have to crawl on the floor to be seen by the nurse, the lawsuit said.
Bellamy was told to sit at a table, according to the lawsuit, but he collapsed face-first on the ground.
He asked to go to the hospital, but the nurse declined to send him, the lawsuit said.
Around 1:30 a.m. on July 21, Bellamy used an intercom to call a jail employee. He screamed “help me, help me,” the lawsuit said. When the employee came to his cell, he found Bellamy in a fetal position on the ground saying, “My stomach hurts really bad, help me.”
A nurse checked on him and noted in her chart, “(Bellamy) was kneeling while his head is on the floor and crying when checked. (Bellamy) verbalized ‘I need to go to the hospital, please help me,’” according to the court documents.
But the employee and nurse never helped Bellamy off the ground and did not send him to the hospital, the lawsuit said. Instead, the nurse noted that Bellamy was “able to stand up, walk outside his cell, sit up and sit still for vitals signs taking.”
Bellamy collapsed once again, as a nurse was taking his vitals, the lawsuit said.
About an hour later, he requested to see the nurse again. The lawsuit says the notes the nurse charted reflected that she was accusing Bellamy of faking the pain.
Bellamy once again collapsed and was left on the ground by employees, according to the lawsuit.
Around 8:40 a.m., Bellamy was seen by a nurse who gave him medicine to help with his stomach pain. However, the lawsuit says due to his severe pain, he spilled much of the medicine on the floor while trying to take it. He wasn’t given any more and was left in his cell crawling to his bed in pain.
A jail guard was also present during this time, and “at times he could be seen smiling and laughing while interacting with other individuals as Lucas suffered on the floor,” the lawsuit said.
Around 12:30 p.m., the jail guard found Bellamy face down in his cell. At 1:17 p.m., he was pronounced dead.
The staff “left Lucas to die in a filthy cell,” the lawsuit says.
“Lucas was not how he died. He was not his addiction. He was a beautiful soul, whose sensitive heart was often overwhelmed by the beauty and the ugliness of this world,” his sister, Sarah Bellamy, said according to MPR News.
Court records say Bellamy’s cause of death was peritonitis due to a duodenal perforation, which means he “died from an infection because there was a hole in his small intestine.” The lawsuit says it could have been treated easily with proper medical care.
The lawsuit, filed Jan. 23 in U. S. District Court by Louis Bellamy, lists Hennepin County, Hennepin Healthcare and several individuals.
McClatchy News reached out to Hennepin County and Hennepin Healthcare for comment. Both declined to comment due to pending litigation but offered sympathy and condolences to Bellamy’s family.
Colleen Bellamy, Lucas Bellamy’s mother, has assigned blame for her son’s death.
“These people in charge of his life knowingly and deliberately decided to do nothing to help him in his moment of crisis, and it was obvious to all that he was in crisis,” she said at a Jan. 23 news conference, according to MPR News.
The lawsuit is asking for an undetermined amount in damages. The family is also seeking further investigation into Bellamy’s death.
“There are systemic issues here, and the family wants accountability and it wants justice for Lucas’ death,” the family’s attorney, Jeff Storms, told MPR News. “But the family also wants to make sure that this never happens to anyone else again.”
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