DEATH BY NEGLECT

A lawsuit alleges an Arkansas jail allowed a mentally challenged man to die of dehydration and starvation behind bars. Who is accountable?

- ERIC FERKENHOFF

HOMELESS, SCHIZOPHRENIC AND WITH AN IQ below 55, Larry Eugene Price Jr., walked into a northwest Arkansas police station on August 19, 2020. Police in the town, Fort Smith, were used to seeing Price, 6-foot-2 and close to 200 pounds, coming in, hanging around for a bit, then leaving.

On that day, though, Price, then 50 and also diagnosed as bipolar with post traumatic stress disorder, pointed his finger like a gun around the station, threatening and cursing. Officers arrested him ona state felony, terroristic threatening in the first degree. There was no settling him down, police say, so he was handcuffed, taken to the Sebastian County Detention Center, locked up and sent before a judge who set bond at 1,000. If he could come up with 100 for bail, he could go free. But Price was destitute.

From then on, everything that could go wrong for Price did. His mental and physical health deteriorated alarmingly. A year and 10 days later, he was found dead in a solitary confinement cell with his eyes wide open, naked, starved, dried saliva on the corners of his mouth, in a pool of standing water so large his feet had shriveled. The antipsychotic and other medications he was taking for his mental condition had long since been taken away. He had resorted to eating his own feces and drinking his own urine. Emergency medical services records show he weighed 90 pounds by the time he died.