Lawsuit: Dakota County jail staff ignored diabetic man’s medical needs, allowed him to ‘languish’ in own ‘filth’

The family of a man who was allegedly kept in a Dakota County jail cell without access to medication in 2022 is suing for negligence and violating his civil rights.

The father of Caleb Duffy, the detainee, is the plaintiff in the federal civil suit. He claims his son is mentally ill and diabetic and was left to “languish” in a padded cell naked and rolling in his own feces, vomit, blood and urine while jail staff let his mental and physical health deteriorate.

In addition to the county, the complaint names Dakota County corrections officers and medical professionals employed by Advanced Correctional Healthcare, a company that contracts with the jail for medical services, as defendants in the suit.

The plaintiff claims law enforcement and medical staff at the jail violated Duffy’s Eighth and 14th Amendment rights and engaged in professional and ordinary negligence.

“We are aware of a lawsuit involving an incident from 2022, which is under review internally,” Dakota County spokesperson Mary Beth Schubert said in a statement. “Due to pending litigation we can’t comment further.”

According to the lawsuit, Hastings police arrested Duffy the evening of July 4, 2022, on suspicion of domestic assault. Duffy had threatened suicide during the arrest and told officers to “put a bullet in his head.”

After Duffy was booked into the Dakota County Jail, his father allegedly called several times to inform jail staff of his son’s medications: gabapentin, an anticonvulsant that has an off-label use to treat anxiety; and insulin for his Type 1 diabetes.

Duffy’s father warned that his son “could become psychotic” if he didn’t receive his gabapentin, but the jail allegedly never attempted to reach him to get the medication. The father brought Duffy’s insulin and gapapentin to the jail late the next morning, the filing states.

By 11 a.m. on July 5, Duffy had gone about 16 hours without a dose of gabapentin — long enough for him to begin experiencing withdrawals, the lawsuit states. Symptoms of gabapentin withdrawal can include nausea, anxiety, agitation and restlessness, according to the American Addiction Centers. Patients may also experience disorientation, hallucinations or paranoid delusions.

Jail staff allegedly never gave Duffy gabapentin over the course of his detention and did not initiate withdrawal protocol, “demonstrating deliberate indifference to Duffy’s serious medical needs and medical negligence,” the lawsuit claims.

Nursing staff had been administering insulin according to a sliding scale, but at noon, he refused his diabetes medication. He reportedly started slamming his head and told the nurse, “I’ll just hit my head until I die.” Duffy then refused to eat his lunch when deputies placed him in a padded cell on suicide watch, the lawsuit states.

Throughout the afternoon, Duffy acted erratically, stripping off his clothes, kicking the cell door and screaming. Around 3:30 p.m., he began vomiting and then slammed his head into the walls. He vomited several more times and urinated and defecated on the floor of the cell.

A deputy noted Duffy had yelled for a doctor twice, and at 4:30 p.m., a medical note indicated Duffy’s blood sugar was “high,” meaning it was too high for the machine to read and would have necessitated a call to the nurse practitioner on duty. However, no such call took place, the lawsuit claims. He did cooperate when a nurse gave him insulin that evening, but he again refused to eat.

Duffy vomited repeatedly throughout the night, and a deputy noted he was lying naked, rocking back and forth and talking to himself. The lawsuit claims he was left to sit in his “filth” through the night but jail staff never took made a note of the conditions inside Duffy’s cell.

Starting at 6 a.m. on July 6, Duffy began hitting his head against the walls of his cell and the metal grate on the floor. When a nurse went to check on him around 8:30 a.m., she saw that Duffy was “rolling around on the floor, without a smock on. Urine, feces and blood was noted on the walls and floor.”

Finally, around 9 a.m., Duffy was taken away in an ambulance. He arrived at Regions Hospital in critical condition; he had an exceedingly high blood sugar reading and was unresponsive. Duffy was in severe diabetic ketoacidosis and needed staples to close a laceration on the back of his head.

The lawsuit states Duffy was also combative with hospital staff, leading them to sedate and intubate him for four days. After two weeks, he was eventually transferred to the hospital’s psychiatric unit, and he was discharged on July 27. The 23-day hospital stay racked up a $220,000 bill, court documents state.

In a statement, Ryan Vettleson, a civil rights attorney representing the Duffy family, condemned the “shocking lack of care by the defendant corrections and jail medical staff.”

“No person should be subjected to such willful indifference,” Vettleson said. ”Mr. Duffy’s plight was so severe that it is extremely difficult to watch any of it on video, but the video goes on for hours on end — and the individuals present at the time did nothing.”