Despite orders from a doctor that he be closely monitored, Gilbert Gil was placed in a holding cell at a Vista jail and ignored for 14 hours, argues a lawsuit filed this week in federal court.
It is the second lawsuit filed in less than a month alleging wrongful death in a San Diego County jail.
Gil, 67, whose family says he suffered from diabetes and showed early signs of dementia, died on Valentine’s Day last year. Their lawsuit argues that his death from a heart condition could have been prevented.
It names the County of San Diego and jail intake nurse Silvia Sauking as defendants and argues that Sauking should have flagged Gil as needing observation.
“Despite knowing Mr. Gil needed medical treatment and monitoring for hypertension, high glucose levels, chest pain and heart palpitations, Defendant Silvia Sauking and (five unnamed deputies) ignored Mr. Gil,” the lawsuit says.
Gil, a retired mechanic, was initially arrested the evening of Feb. 12 for driving under the influence of methamphetamine after he drove his car into a ditch in Escondido.
When his daughter, Jennifer Schmidt, picked him up from jail the next morning, he could barely walk and was struggling to speak, she told the San Diego Union-Tribune in an interview last year. He was yelling for his mother who had died recently, she said, and didn’t seem to understand what had happened to him.
Schmidt said she cared for her father the best she could and took him back to the apartment he shared with his brother.
That night, Feb. 13, Gil started acting erratically, again asking for his mother and failing to recognize his own brother.
Gil’s brother called his son, Gil’s nephew, who came over to the apartment and decided to call paramedics. According to Gil’s official autopsy report, released in December, his “nephew indicated that the decedent had been acting belligerently, hitting walls in his room and may have been under the influence of methamphetamine, which the decedent had a history of using.”
Escondido police officers showed up and arrested Gil for being under the influence of a controlled substance, but first took him to Palomar Hospital.
Medical records obtained by Gil’s family show that he refused certain medical tests. He was released from the hospital to the jail, but with a note from the doctor asking deputies to return him to the hospital if he kept having chest pain or heart palpitations.
At the Vista Detention Facility, a check of his blood sugar showed a level of 253 — more than twice the normal level. According to the lawsuit, he was given five units of insulin and placed in a holding cell.
Jail medical records usually document all interactions with a patient. Gil’s indicate no one checked on him between when he was given the insulin and when he was found unresponsive in his cell.
The lawsuit argues that this violates the jail’s standard nursing protocol, which requires follow-up tests.
“Limited medical records indicate that Sauking did not order follow-up glucose testing,” the lawsuit says.
Gil’s autopsy report, which describes surveillance video footage from the holding cell, confirms that no one checked Gil for signs of life even after he appears to have lost consciousness.
“Eventually, the decedent stops moving and remains in a slumped forward position,” the autopsy report says in describing the footage. “A few minutes after the decedent stops moving, a staff member looks into the decedent’s cell and eventually walks away.”
Another 42 minutes ed before jail staff entered the cell, discovered Gil unresponsive and started to perform R, the autopsy report says, citing the footage.
The autopsy attributed Gil’s death to heart disease, with diabetes, methamphetamine toxicity, dehydration, liver disease, and pulmonary emphysema as contributing conditions. A toxicology report found a small amount of methamphetamine in his system.
In an interview with the Union-Tribune last March, Schmidt said her father did not drink or use drugs.
In a more recent interview, she said that in the past, he had used meth to get through the work day. But she believed he had stopped using the drug after he retired. For months, she said, she had attributed his erratic behavior to early signs of dementia.
The family had a second autopsy conducted by former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s Autopsy Initiative, which covers all costs associated with second autopsies for families of people whose deaths occurred in custody or at the hands of police officers.
That autopsy mostly agreed with the San Diego Medical Examiner’s findings, but did not find that Gil had methamphetamine in his system when he died or that the drug contributed to his death.
“As such, at all times relevant to this complaint, Mr. Gil’s unstable behavior was associated with severe medical distress, not drug use,” the lawsuit says.
Danielle Pena, the family’s attorney, said that she and the family are relying on the findings by the Autopsy Initiative.
“There are still many uncertainties surrounding Mr. Gil’s premature death,” she said. “The focus of any inquiry should be limited to why Mr. Gil’s known medical needs were neglected, and the remedial measures that must be implemented to prevent this from happening again.”
