Inmate’s family sues Pierce County over his suicide while in jail

The family of a man who hanged himself in the Pierce County Jail is suing the county, contending corrections officials did not do enough to monitor Jesse Lowry despite what it says was a documented history of mental illness and suicidal thoughts.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for Lowry’s four children. The suit was filed Nov. 5 in U.S. District Court on the family’s behalf by attorney Darrell Cochran.

The county breached its duty to Lowry “by placing Lowry in a regular jail cell without suicide watch despite knowing that he had a longstanding prior history of suicidal thoughts, polysubstance abuse and severe mental health diseases,” according to the lawsuit.

“The acts and omissions … amount to deliberate indifference to the known risk that Jesse Lowry would commit suicide, leaving his parents without their son and his children without a father,” Cochran wrote.

The jail handled Lowry’s detention appropriately, said Ed Troyer, the spokesman for Sheriff Paul Pastor, who oversees the jail.

“He didn’t say anything about being suicidal or suffering mental health problems when he was booked, but we put him through a mental health evaluation anyway because he had such a high charge,” Troyer said Friday.

“Even during that, he didn’t make any comments about being suicidal, so he went into the regular population.

“He had two chances to tell us, and he didn’t.”

Lowry, 28, was booked into the jail on Nov. 25, 2012, for investigation of first-degree robbery and first-degree assault.

Prosecutors alleged in charging documents that he hit a man in the head with a rock and repeatedly slammed his knee into the man’s head before stealing his car.

He later led police on a chase before being arrested, court records show.

Lowry was charged with three felonies the next day and notified that, if convicted, he faced life in prison without parole under Washington’s “three strikes you’re out” law, court records show.

“We don’t think it was mental-health related,” Troyer said. “We think he didn’t want to go to prison for the rest of his life.”

According to the federal lawsuit, Lowry was moved to an isolation cell two days later after being assaulted by his cellmate.

He used a bedsheet to hang himself in that isolation cell Dec. 1.

His family contends Lowry, who’d been booked into the jail numerous times in the past, should have been placed on suicide watch after his final arrest.

He suffered brain damage when hit over the head with a baseball bat at 16 and had been placed on suicide watch at the jail before, their lawsuit contends.

“Over the course of these stays at (the jail), the Health Services Division had documented a well-established history of Lowry’s anxiety, depression, paranoia, schizophrenia and polysubstance abuse,” the lawsuit states.

The family also contends jail staff members ignored two notes Lowry sent to health workers after his final arrest. In one of them, he reported hearing voices and asked for help, the lawsuit states.

Records from one of Lowry’s previous criminal cases indicate state mental health workers had questions about whether he really suffered from mental illness.

He was evaluated in 2010 to see if he was competent to stand trial on a burglary charge.

In a report to the court, state psychologist Gregg Gaglardi wrote that, “At this point, the available clinical evidence does not support a conclusion that Mr. Lowry suffers from a major mental illness or defect.”

“It is possible that he had a serious traumatic brain injury, but we have no objective records to support or refute this claim,” Gaglardi wrote. “He also claims a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia made following a (state Department of Social and Health Services) evaluation, but we have no records to corroborate his self report.”

A judge later found Lowry competent to stand trial in the 2010 case, and he pleaded guilty.

The family’s lawsuit contends an autopsy conducted on Lowry “found significant brain injury secondary to the incident when he was 16 years old.”

This story was originally published November 15, 2015 at 7:41 AM with the headline "Inmate’s family sues Pierce County over his suicide while in jail."