Indiana inmate died after losing 45 lbs. over 20 days of solitary confinement: lawsuit

An Indiana man died in solitary confinement at the Jackson County Jail after losing 45 lbs. in less than three weeks, his family’s attorneys alleged in a new lawsuit.

Joshua McLemore, 28, was immediately placed in solitary confinement after a June 20, 2021, incident at a hospital in which he pulled a nurse’s hair while having an “acute psychotic episode,” a federal complaint filed by the Budge and Heipt law firm on behalf of his estate reads.

He stayed in a bare room with no windows, a locked bathroom and florescent lights for the next three weeks, naked, where he allegedly “continued to suffer from active psychosis while receiving no medical or mental health treatment and virtually no human contact,” according to the complaint.

“For almost three weeks, Josh spent his waking hours sitting down, getting up, lying on the floor, staring into space, randomly gesticulating, twirling his blanket, playing with his food, rolling around in trash, smearing his feces, eating paper, randomly twisting his body into various contortions, staring into the security camera, chewing Styrofoam, and attempting in vain to look out of the covered window in his door, as well as displaying other erratic and peculiar behaviors,” the complaint states.

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Surveillance footage from inside the cell where McLemore was held spans more than 400 hours and shows “the inhumane nature of Josh’s confinement, his active psychosis, and his deteriorating condition over the course of his confinement,” the lawsuit says.

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“Where am I?” McLemore can be heard saying in one portion of the footage obtained by Budge and Heipt.

An Indiana State Police detective who reviewed the surveillance footage as part of the agency’s investigation into McLemore’s case estimated that the inmate got only 15 hours of sleep over the course of his 20-day confinement.

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The only lengthy interactions McLemore had with humans were when he was “forcibly” restrained while jail staff cleaned his cell and gave him showers while he was strapped to a chair.

Despite being placed on “Medical Observation,” he “received virtually no medical monitoring or care of any kind throughout his confinement, even as his psychosis persisted and his physical condition worsened,” the complaint alleges.

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McLemore was eventually admitted to a Cincinnati hospital on Aug. 9, 2021, after becoming so “severely ill” that the jail hospital could not adequately treat him. He died two days in the hospital due to organ failure, according to the lawsuit.

His official autopsy lists his cause of death as “multiple organ failure due to refusal to eat or drink with altered mental status due to untreated schizophrenia.”

The 28-year-old had a history of schizophrenia and drug use. Prior to being transported from the hospital to jail on June 20, 2021, McLemore made barking noises, yelled, bit the door of the police vehicle and apparently licked an officer’s computer.

McLemore’s mother died about 16 months after her son, according the complaint.