Claim: Jailers mocked dying young woman during her last hours
Everett woman’s death by heroin withdrawal ‘completely preventable’
Updated 11:53 pm, Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Lindsay Kronberger made a life in Everett.
At Everett High, she was a four-sport athlete before she became a graduate in 2008. Two years later she married her high school sweetheart, a Navy man, and settled in.
By the winter of 2014, though, Kronberger was making her home at Snohomish County Jail. She took her final rest there, dying at age 24 of complications related to heroin withdrawal.
Now Kronberger’s family claims staff at the Everett jail failed to deliver life-saving treatment to the young woman as she died. They also claim jailers were caught on video mocking the emaciated young woman after she lost the strength to stand.
“Lindsay suffered tremendously at the hands of her jailers in the last few days of her life, and her death was completely preventable,” said Karen Moore, an attorney with Brewe Layman representing the Kronbergers.
Kronberger died just weeks after Snohomish County agreed to pay $1.3 million to the family of Lyndsey Lason, another young woman who died at the jail. Both women were part of a troubling series of deaths there that left county officials promising changes.
On Wednesday, Moore said her client’s death calls into question those promises. The attorney said it is “impossible to believe” the county is committed to changing “the way they do business at the jail.”
Days before her death on Jan. 13, 2014, Kronberger was booked into Snohomish County Jail on suspicion of violating a court order. She told jail staff then that she was a heroin addict.
Heroin withdrawal alone is rarely fatal, but the symptoms of withdrawal – pain, nausea, diarrhea – can be. In Kronberger’s case, she died of heart problems brought on by dehydration caused by her withdrawal.
Jail nurses placed Kronberger on a “detox watch” when she arrived. One noted that, at 95 pounds, she appeared emaciated. Her heart was racing – an exam conducted eight days before her death put her pulse at 144 beats per minute – as her blood pressure fell.
Kronberger asked for drugs to treat her anxiety. She told jail staff she was having panic attacks and couldn’t sleep. She was given medications for nausea and vomiting, her attorneys said, but does not appear to have been seen by a doctor.
A registered nurse at the jail would later tell a Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office detective that Kronberger’s situation confused staff, according to the lawsuit.
“It was just a real uphill struggle to get a handle on what was going on,” said the nurse, who examined Kronberger two days before her death. The woman’s blood pressure was dangerously low at the time.
Kronberger asked to be taken to a hospital, but jail medical staff didn’t feel that was necessary, her family’s attorneys said in the complaint. She was left alone in a cell littered with vomit-filled biohazard bags.
By the evening before her death, Kronberger could no longer stand on her own. She asked for a wheelchair but was instead dragged into another cell.
Writing in court papers, Moore said corrections officers can be seen on surveillance video joking about Kronberger’s condition. One deputy mimics the dying young woman while a sergeant laughingly makes mocking hand motions. Another is seen dancing in front of her cell door.
“Lindsay was medically fragile, vulnerable, and completely under their power and control,” Moore said in the civil complaint. “They stood just outside her cell mimicking and mocking her as she lay on her bed suffering needlessly.”
According to the lawsuit, a jail nurse falsely claimed she found Kronberger to be improving during an examination hours before she died. In truth, the former long-distance runner couldn’t even walk to a drink cart just feet from her cell.
Early on Jan. 13, 2014, a corrections officer looked in to find Kronberger face down in her cell’s toilet. Having lost eight pounds in nine days, her heart had given out.
Kronberger’s family set her to rest a week later at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church. Now, Moore said, they hope to keep other Snohomish County families from having to mourn inmates they love.
“Lindsay’s family wants to ensure that the no one else suffers this same fate,” said Moore, whose law firm is joined by Cogdill Nichols Rein Wartelle Andrews in representing the Kronbergers.
Kronberger’s death came just weeks after a U.S. Department of Justice review found serious deficiencies at the Snohomish County Jail. Notably, evaluators found the jail health staff were undertrained or unqualified. They also suggested jail managers improve their handling of people withdrawing from heroin, a drug that has hit Snohomish County hard in recent years.
Requests for comment to Snohomish County were not returned Wednesday. Attorneys for the county have not yet responded to the lawsuit, which was filed recently in U.S. District Court at Seattle.
Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.
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