Jail deaths

County balks at saying how men died in custody

NEWPORT – When Sgt. Dan Emert finished booking two prisoners in the Pend Oreille County Jail at 10:10 on a Wednesday night in August 2022, the corrections sergeant returned to his office and looked at the cameras monitoring the dozen or so inmates being held in the small jail. He saw inmate Franz Kroll hanging from a phone cord in his cell. Inmates have access to pay phones in a common area outside two cells.

“I ran down the hall into cell 16 and removed Kroll from the phone cord,” he wrote in the incident report. He and others tried CPR and used a defibrillator to try to restart Kroll’s heart. Emergency Medical Services were called and tried to revive him.

At 10:30 EMS stopped and declared the time of death. Ten months later, in April of 2023, at 3:30 in the morning, two corrections officers checked on inmate Jacob Mitchell after noticing he hadn’t moved. They found him pale and stiff and tried to revive him. They called EMS, who declared Mitchell dead 3:45 a.m.

Both inmates reported medical problems in jail before their deaths. According to the incident report, Kroll had been taken to Newport Community Hospital at 7 a.m. the day he died after telling staff he was feeling bad and that “...his new meds were making him feel like he was dying.” Nothing wrong was found by medical staff at the hospital and he was returned to jail.

Mitchell had several medical problems, including type 1 diabetes. Except for when he was at Eastern Washington State Hospital for competency evaluation, he had been held at the Pend Oreille County Jail since his arrest in February 2022.

According to another prisoner who called The Miner after Mitchell died, Mitchell had been crying out in pain for four days. He was in a cell with two other inmates until he was moved Tuesday, the inmate said. He died the next day.

The Miner has been trying to find out how the men died since their deaths were announced. The incident reports were among the handful of documents the county released in response to a public records request by The Miner in September 2023 seeking documents related to how the men died as well as investigative reports into the deaths.

For seven months, the county maintained that by state law autopsies and death certificates were not releasable to the public. County officials said the Newport Police Department had conducted the investigations into the deaths and recommended The Miner contact them.

The Miner engaged attorneys who sent a letter and after receiving the attorneys’ letter, the county responded with six documents totaling eight pages April 30 and a message explaining why they were withholding everything else.

Citing a state law that prohibits the release of autopsies, the county maintains that “all documents, photos, etc. that lead to the cause of death were also exempt from release.” They did not identify what specific items were being withheld and why, as required by the Public Records Act. The Miner is still seeking that information, claiming there is a legitimate public interest in knowing how the prisoners died while in custody.

There are likely many more documents, videos, audios and reports about the deaths. Kroll’s death was the first death in the county jail since it was built at its current location in 1980.

Brandon Pence is an attorney with the Seattle law firm MacDonald Hoague and Bayless, who is retained by Mitchell’s family. He said the firm had received many documents, videos and recordings, including the autopsy report months ago. State law allows release of autopsies and death certificates to the family. The family provided the photo of Mitchell.

Kroll and Mitchell were both murderers. Mitchell was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to second degree murder for shooting his mother, Carolyn Thompson-Mitchell in February 2022. Kroll called police after shooting his wife, Patricia Kroll, in April 2023.

According to a state law passed in 2021, chief law enforcement officers are supposed to conduct an Unexpected Fatality Review and release a report to the state Department of Health within 120 days of an unexpected death. Sheriff Glenn Blakeslee is the chief law enforcement officer in the county.

Although Pend Oreille County Public Records Officer Aimee Emtman wrote The Miner April 30 that, “After a search by Pend Oreille County Sheriff Office staff no additional records were located based on your request,” Blakeslee said that an Unexpected Fatality Review had been conducted on Kroll’s death and a report written.

He said he was trying to put it on the DOH site Tuesday but wasn’t successful. He agreed to release it to The Miner Tuesday, but said that he had to check with Prosecutor Dolly Hunt first, even though the DOH says the reports are available to the public. The Miner had not received the report as of press time.

Blakeslee said he was set to have a review of Mitchell’s death conducted, but that a key member of the investigation team stepped aside, so he’s trying to find someone else to do it. He said that Pend Oreille County Sheriff’s Office staff had recently completed an Unexpected Death Review for Lincoln County.

Blakeslee said that he has taken some steps to improve jail safety for prisoners since the deaths.

He said staff has reviewed policies, moved some things to make medical accessibility easier and had shortened the phone cords.

MICHELLE NEDVED CONTRIBUTED TO THIS STORY.