Utah judge rules jail nurse can be held liable for giving ibuprofen to inmate with a fatally ruptured spleen

After Heather Ashton Miller fell from the top bunk of her jail cell and onto the concrete floor below, she told the facility’s nurse that her entire body hurt.

Her cellmate added that she saw Miller hit her head. When Miller tried to get up, the woman she was bunking with said that Miller had also smashed her side pretty hard, too.

Davis County jail’s nurse Mavin Anderson helped walk Miller to another cell — because she couldn’t stand on her own — and gave her some ibuprofen. She was nauseous and dizzy and had a hard time answering his questions. At one point, another jail staffer found her curled up on the floor moaning. Another said she was bleeding from her chin and arm.

But Anderson didn’t check on Miller again until after she had died.

In fact, he never checked her vitals at all — even to see if her blood pressure had dropped after the fall — supposedly a standard practice for serious injuries at the jail. And for that, a Utah judge ruled Monday, the nurse can be held liable for Miller’s death.

The latest decision from the U.S. District Court comes nearly two years after Miller’s mother, Cynthia Stella, filed the case on her daughter’s behalf, alleging that jail staff showed deliberate indifference in offering her medical care. Miller, 28, died in December 2016 after she had ruptured her spleen in her cell and more than a liter of blood pooled into her abdomen.

Stella has argued that if jail staff, particularly Anderson, had responded appropriately and immediately by checking Miller’s vitals, the problem would have been detected and her daughter would not have died. Anderson has said that he thought Miller was just experiencing drug withdrawals and didn’t need help.

The judge’s decision means that the case against Anderson can move forward to either a trial or a settlement.

“There is evidence that Nurse Anderson should have realized the significant risk that Miller had been seriously injured by falling from an upper bunk onto a concrete floor,” wrote Judge Jill Parrish. Instead, she noted, he showed “deliberate indifference to Miller’s medical needs [that] resulted in her death.”

Miller had been in jail for less than two days on misdemeanor complaints of possessing drug paraphernalia. A toxicology report found only trace amounts of methamphetamine and THC in Miller’s system at the time of her fall.

Emergency medics arrived at the jail at least two hours and 44 minutes after Miller slipped, and she was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.

Parrish added: “[Anderson] did not perform a basic blood pressure exam nor did he return to see if her pain had subsided. Miller was unconscious and unmoving for three hours on the floor of her cell before she was taken to the medical unit."

Parrish’s ruling does, however, grant immunity to Davis County Sheriff Todd Richardson and jail nurse James Ondricek, who oversaw and trained the medical staff. Neither of them, she said, directly caused Miller’s death. The county as a whole, though, can be sued for not having a written medical policy in its jails, she said.

The lawsuit filed by Miller’s family focuses on how the staff at the jail violated Miller’s constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment and lacked proper policies to keep inmates safe. Neither Stella’s attorney nor the attorney representing Davis County could be reached for comment.

At the time of Miller’s death, Weber County investigators were called to look into the incident. Records obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune indicate they were concerned with how jail staff responded to the death, namely that they enlisted an inmate to clean Miller’s cell following her fall and that Miller’s family wasn’t notified of her death for nearly a week.

After receiving the results of the investigation into Miller’s death, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes announced in May that all jail employees had been cleared of criminal wrongdoing.

Miller’s case, though, was just one of a handful of inmate deaths in Utah over the past several years — and is not the only one being challenged.