A nurse was fired for lying about her care for an Alexandria inmate who died in custody, according to court records. The sister of 24-year-old Farah Saleh Farah has filed a wrongful-death suit against the company that handles medical care at the Alexandria Detention Center and two of its employees. The lawsuit alleges that the Correct Care Solutions employees should have secured emergency care for Farah when he stopped taking his schizophrenia medication, eating and drinking, and should have recognized that his dehydration could be fatal.
In a court filing last week, an Alexandria sheriff’s captain says CCS supervisors determined that Nigist Ketema, one of the nurses treating Farah, didn’t spend enough time in his cell to take his vital signs, according to video footage from the jail. That was two days before Farah’s Jan. 23, 2008, death, when he was vomiting and nauseated, court documents say, and Ketema logged vital signs for Farah in her report.
But CCS officials determined “that the vital signs listed in the medical communications book appear to have been fabricated” and Ketema was “immediately dismissed,” according to court documents.
Patrick Cummiskey, the CCS executive vice president, said in an email that the company doesn’t comment on employees. He said CCS officials “strongly disagree” with the suit’s accusations and declined to comment further.
Also last week, a federal judge ruled that the actions of Ketema and another nurse might have violated Farah’s Eighth Amendment rights, but the company’s policies did not.
The order from District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee says the Eighth Amendment prohibits prison officials from showing “deliberate indifference to prisoners’ serious medical needs” and it’s possible that the nurses “had knowledge of the substantial risk of harm to Decedent and disregarded that risk.”
But there’s no evidence that CCS had any policies that led an employee to provide inadequate care, Lee wrote.
The company remains a defendant on the wrongful-death count said Victor Glasberg, attorney for Farah’s sister, Obah Walker. He said he’s “delighted” the Eighth Amendment claims against the nurses can proceed.
Farah, an Alexandria resident, had been in custody for a probation violation on a concealed-weapons charge.
In jail, Farah “ate and drank virtually nothing,” the lawsuit alleges, and CCS staff did not treat him even though guards described his condition as “cadaverous” in the days before his death.
