SAN DIEGO (CN) — A San Diego nurse practitioner was dismissed Friday from a wrongful death case brought by the family of a 22-year-old that died in a San Diego County jail in 2022, but his employer, one of many defendants remaining in the case, may still have to face claims it was liable for the conditions that led to the death.
The family of William Hayden Schuck, who was arrested on drug charges after a rollover crash in San Diego in March 2022, say in their complaint that he died after being in custody for six days, from dehydration and untreated withdrawal symptoms which ultimately caused heart failure — all of which were preventable if San Diego County and jailhouse medical staff provided him the treatment he needed.
One of these staff members was Nicholas Kahl, a nurse practitioner at UC San Diego Medical Center, who the Schuck family claimed reviewed one of their son’s medical records called a “after visit summary.” Kahl, the family claimed, should have reviewed more of their son’s medical records and should have known how serious his medical needs were.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, a George W. Bush appointee, disagreed, writing in an order on Friday that Schuck’s family did not plausibly claim that the record Kahl saw had enough information to “put Kahl on notice of Schuck’s serious medical conditions,” or that Kahl ever saw or had access to Schuck’s jail medical records.
The family also did not explain why the “after visit summary” report should have alerted Kahl to Schuck’s condition, Sabraw wrote.
“Without such allegations, the court is not in a position to assess whether Kahl’s actions after reading the after-visit summary could plausibly have been ‘objectively unreasonable’ in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Sabraw added in his order granting Kahl’s dismissal from the case.
Schuck’s family claims that their 22 year old son, who had ADHD and struggled with substance abuse issues, was transferred back and forth from a local jail to UC San Diego Medical Center’s emergency department,
In their complaint, the family claims that Schuck’s blood pressure was consistently high, and even reaching abnormally high levels, when he was examined on different days while incarcerated, and that he stumbled and fell multiple times, including after he left his own arraigned, where he couldn’t confirm his own name or date of birth to the judge.
Romeo DeGuzman, a registered nurse, described Schuck as being disorganized and having an “altered thought process” and looking disheveled, with dried blood on his shirt and not wearing any pants, Schuck’s family claims in their lawsuit.
“Despite these increasingly serious signs of medical distress, including unexplained wounds, DeGuzman did not summon medical care,” the family adds.
DeGuzman is one of many individual medical staff members, the companies that employ them, sheriff deputies, both the former and current San Diego County Sheriffs, and San Diego County, that are named as defendants in the suit.
Sabraw granted another defendant — Correctional Healthcare Partners, the company that employed Kahl — their motion to dismiss some of the charges against them, including that they acted with deliberate Schuck’s health and safety, and that they acted negligently.
The one claim that the company will still have to face is that they have longstanding practices that cause deliberate indifference to incarcerated people’s health and constitutional rights, and that they fail to properly train employees to properly evaluate the health of incarcerated people and their medical needs.
In early July, the family of Elisa Serna — a 24-year-old pregnant woman who died alone on the floor of a San Diego County jail in 2019 — settled their civil suit against San Diego county for $15 million and an agreement that requires the county to update their training policies for jailhouse staff, including a requirement that the county provide information about the extent of their use of alcohol and opioid withdrawal protocols for inmates.
According to the Sheriff’s Department, 75 people have died in custody since Elisa Serna’s death in 2019, including seven people in 2024 so far.
In 2022, the California state auditor found that 185 people died in San Diego County jails from 2006 to 2020, in one of the highest rates of inmate deaths in the state. Another 2022 report by the San Diego Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board found that excess deaths “only appear among those who have not yet been sentenced.”
Attorneys for the Schuck family, Kahl, and Correctional Healthcare Partners did not immediately respond to requests for comment.