Let me tell you what happened to Victor Stevenson, and then I want you to explain to me why any human being with a pulse should trust a single word these people say.
Stevenson is 59 years old. He got arrested for trespassing at an elementary school in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Misdemeanor. He was speaking incoherently. He told the jail staff he was suicidal “right now.” He couldn’t even sign his own booking form. So what did the professionals do? They put him in a locked, dark cell with no toilet and walked away.
For five days.
He paced naked. He hallucinated. He rolled on the concrete floor until the skin tore off his legs. He lay in his own feces. He moaned. He meowed. He refused food and water. And every single person who walked past that cell, every deputy, every medical staffer, every contracted behavioral health worker, looked at a man dissolving in front of them and did nothing. Not one set of vital signs. Not one trip to a hospital. Their own written policy required emergency clearance before they ever accepted him. They skipped it.
And here is what they did instead, on their own body cameras, which they apparently forgot exist. When they finally moved him on day five, a sergeant held his hand up to another officer’s nose and said, “Wanna smell?” An officer named Davidson told Stevenson to “lift your feet up” and then broke into laughter mid-sentence. Another deputy joked about transporting him in the trunk of a patrol car. The trunk. Of a car. Like he was a bag of mulch.
Judge Magazine (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsBy the time they got him to the hospital, he was in kidney failure. In septic shock. No blood flow in his left leg. His heart stopped and had to be restarted. Surgeons amputated his entire left leg at the hip. Pathological testing confirmed gangrene. A former machinist who now depends on other people to help him use the bathroom. For a misdemeanor trespass charge he ultimately pleaded guilty to and got a year of probation.
Now here is the part that makes me want to flip a table. The Klamath County sheriff said in November 2024 that the treatment of Stevenson had been “reviewed and handled in a manner deemed appropriate.” No investigation. No discipline. A nurse at the hospital was so horrified by his condition that she filed a report with Adult Protective Services and took photographs. A nurse. Not a deputy. Not a supervisor. A nurse who had never met this man before and saw what your tax dollars did to him.
And it is not just Oregon. Down in Fulton County, Georgia, a 34-year-old man named Rashaad Mohammed says he begged jail medical staff for antibiotics to treat a bladder condition. He was vomiting. He could not stand up. “Nobody’s coming,” he said. He lost both legs and most of his fingers to sepsis. The sheriff’s office says he was already ill when he arrived and was only in the medical unit for 11 of his 177 days in custody. Eleven days of medical supervision for a man who ended up losing his limbs. Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. wants an investigation. Ben Crump, who represented the family of LaShawn Thompson, says the jail has not changed since Thompson died in custody. Why would it? Nobody has been held accountable for anything.
I have raised four children. When one of my kids gets a fever of 102, I am up at 2 a.m. checking on them. These people watched a man rot in real time and made jokes about the smell. They put him in a cell without a toilet. They ignored their own policies. They recorded themselves doing it. And then the sheriff stood up and said it was all appropriate.
Appropriate. That is the word he chose.
Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsSo I have a question for the manager. If this is what appropriate looks like, what does it take to get inappropriate? Because from where I am sitting, a man lost his leg over a trespassing charge and the people who let it happen are still collecting paychecks. They think you are too dumb to notice. They think the word “appropriate” will make you move on.
Are you going to?