Sarah Stillman
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You know, I think I can stand behind that 100 percent and I wish I couldn't. But the sad thing, having seen so many of these videos and looked so closely at these cases, I think what I've seen again and again is that in some of them it actually was ruled homicide because of that specific type of long scale neglect.
Every day someone was coming in and noticing this person hadn't had a drink of water. In some cases, in cases that were found homicides, the people actually at the jail had shut the water off to the cell. I mean, I'm thinking about a young man named Keaton Ferris. He grew up right near where my parents live. My parents live on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington State.
It's a really beautiful place. And Keaton really loved it. He always was writing on social media about his love of the ocean and of nature. And then he wound up in a jail in the midst of a mental health crisis where the jail officials actually cut the water off to his cell for four days.
And in his case, ultimately, the sheriff did apologize when he died to the family, but they had to protest immediately. for almost every day outside the jail. And there's a big community movement kind of speaking up about this in his case, but also a great many others.
Well, in a shocking number of the lawsuits, records were actively destroyed. In some cases, judges found in regard to some of the companies that records had not just been accidentally discarded, but there were problems with the choice to not retain records, even in the context of litigation where a teenager had died. And so that was a major issue I found.
And then even just trying to get the basics on like who's dying in jails and of what, we found that often when we asked for records, first of all, the jails don't keep good records on the specific category of death. The categories often we found were people were said to have had a quote unquote natural death.
And these were people often in their 30s or 40s or again, even their teens who had died of starvation, which doesn't seem terribly natural, but that's how it's classified most of the time in the records.
It really runs the gamut. I mean, I found a case in Florida of a young person in his 20s that was classified as a suicide and the cause of death was described as fasting. And in other cases, as I mentioned, sometimes it is actually found to be a homicide because these people were in the care of a facility that didn't care for them.
And then in other cases, it is listed as exactly what it was, but classified as natural. So it really, you see the full range.
I believe so. It makes a difference, too, to what the public knows and doesn't know. I mean, I think we haven't really understood this to be a pattern for quite some time because it's hard to surface it.
And I think there's many, many more cases than we know of because many of the cases I was able to find I found through the painstaking process of looking for litigation and doing these record searches. But one has to imagine there's many cases we never find out about. Because people like the main woman I wrote about, Mary Casey, she actually died in hospice care, not in the actual jail itself.
So she would never be counted as a jail death. And I think it's also important to note, I mean, most of these cases are people who the jail wasn't always the one depriving them of food and water. I mean, much of the time it was people who just were being untreated for their mental health issues, often placed in solitary and ceasing to eat, which I think it's not intuitive to many people.
And it wasn't intuitive to me when I began that that's actually a common, predictable symptom of certain mental health disorders. Because they believe that the food may be poisoned or... Also because of severe depression, because of all the things that happen to you when you're placed in solitary.
You know, I talked to this one professor, Craig Haney, who's an expert on these things across many decades. And he does a lot of jail visits. And he said, look, you have to imagine that even as a healthy person, he goes into many of these solitary cells and instantaneously gets overwhelmed by the despair of it. And so you can imagine if you already have a preexisting mental health issue, you're
that it could be a place where you might cease to have any hope and any will. And that can sometimes include the will to want to take care of yourself and want to eat and to drink.
Well, you know, it's interesting to me. I was looking back the other day at the original email they'd written me to pitch me on this story.
And I realized they'd actually pitched it as a story about how many people are deprived of their right to get a hearing before a judge simply because they're actually being detained, often because they're being criminalized for being homeless or because they're being criminalized for a mental health issue. And then they're not being treated.
And so they're decompensating and being in a situation where the jailers then say they can't bring them to court because they're not mentally well enough. So it's this weird paradox where people are falling into this bizarre legal black hole and not having their right to go to trial or go to a hearing with a judge. So that's how it was actually brought to me.
And at the end, they mentioned, you know, and she starved to death. And to me, of course, my eyes popped out and I said, OK, she's starved? Like that was just was shocking to me. So I thought, OK, yeah, I'll look into this. And I thought I'd just write a short piece about Mary. And that was my intention. But then I started digging and found another case like that and then another case.
And it turned out that firm alone had actually taken on a bunch of starvation and dehydration death cases. So, yeah, that was a complete shock to me that there were so many cases to uncover. So many more I still haven't uncovered.
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