Although they could tell something was amiss with one inmate, Patrick County deputies assigned to work in the jail on Jan. 18 did not know the seriousness of the issue, according to Patrick County Sheriff Dan Smith and Sgt. Matt Holland.
But as deputies Mike Dalton, Rockie Roberts and Eric Litz conducted a routine security check in the male maximum housing unit around 5:30 p.m. that day, they had a conversation with an inmate who told them that he needed to be placed into isolation because he was having suicidal thoughts, Smith said.
Holland said he has known the inmate since the inmate was a child. “You can kind of tell when something is off, when somebody is having a bad day,” he said.
Dalton also realized something was amiss, and had asked the inmate “are you doing alright this afternoon,” Holland said.
The inmate related to Dalton that “he was having a bad day and told him that he was thinking about doing something to (harm) himself,” Holland said, and recalled that he was in the control room at the jail when Dalton asked if he could step in the pod to speak with the inmate.
When Holland spoke to the man, “he broke down and started crying,” Holland said, adding that the inmate again said he was having thoughts of self harm.
As is customary in those situations, Holland said the inmate was placed on suicide watch.
Smith said the inmate later told Holland that he had planned on hanging himself in the shower that evening, but “as I walked and talked with him, he told me that the (jail) crew had stopped to check on him throughout the day, pausing to talk to him” all without knowing that the inmate planned to commit suicide, Holland said.
Each time a deputy paused to talk to him, the inmate said the contact and the fact that the deputies seemed to care, prompted him to hesitate with his plan.
“He said it made him think that maybe the world isn’t out to get me,” Holland said the inmate told him.
The inmate said the deputies “talked to me like they cared,” Smith and Holland added.
“And it wasn’t just the one stop to check on him, it was numerous stops” by various crew members that day that helped to change the inmate’s mind, Holland said.
“It wasn’t anything any one person did. It was a group effort, and at the time, we didn’t even know. I work with exceptional people. Every one of them made a difference,” Holland said.
“We have no doubt that he would have followed through if we had not intervened,” Smith said.
“The attentiveness and compassion shown by the deputies that day saved a life. It is the everyday actions of our personnel that change people’s lives for the better, and the public needs to hear about those actions,” he said.
The identity of the inmate is not being released for confidentiality purposes.
