Six weeks after a Lowertown man died in custody at the Wentworth County Jail, the sheriff's office has released the findings of its internal review: understaffed overnight shifts meant no corrections officer was available to escort him to the jail's medical unit for nearly 45 minutes after he was found unresponsive.
The Wentworth County Sheriff’s Office has concluded its internal investigation into the death of Terrell Vance, the 34-year-old Lowertown man who died in custody last month, finding that staffing shortages on the jail’s overnight shift delayed a medical response by more than 40 minutes after officers found him unresponsive.
Sheriff Nathaniel Cobb said the review, conducted by the department’s internal affairs unit with input from an outside corrections consultant, determined that only two corrections officers were on duty to supervise a wing holding 94 inmates the night Vance died, below the jail’s own minimum staffing standard of four. “Our people did not ignore Mr. Vance,” Pruitt said. “They were managing an entire wing with half the staff our policy requires, and that is on us at the leadership level, not on the officers working that night.”
Report details a night of missed checks
According to the report’s summary, released publicly Tuesday, Vance requested to see medical staff twice during the evening shift, and both requests were logged but not relayed to the on-call nurse before the shift change. A required 30-minute welfare check was skipped twice during the overnight hours, the report found, and 47 minutes elapsed between when an officer discovered Vance unresponsive and when he reached the jail’s medical unit, in part because the unit’s designated golf cart transport was being used elsewhere in the facility.
Jail Administrator Capt. Elias Whitmore said the department has since revised its policy to require immediate radio dispatch of any medical distress call regardless of staffing levels elsewhere in the building, and has ordered a second transport cart for the facility’s east wing. “Those are fixes we should have made before this happened, not after,” Whitmore said.
Forty-seven minutes. That is how long my brother lay there while people figured out how to get him help. I don’t have the words for how that feels to hear out loud.
Patrice Vance, sister of Terrell Vance
Vance’s sister, Patrice Vance, said the family’s attorney is reviewing the report as it prepares a wrongful-death claim against the county. “This report confirms what we already believed, that the system failed him long before his heart did,” she said.
Advocates renew calls for outside oversight
Nadia Fontaine, the public defender who represented Vance, said the findings validate concerns she had raised about his access to a documented withdrawal-management plan while in custody. “An internal review getting to the right answer this time doesn’t mean the process was independent,” Fontaine said. “We still think the county needs a standing outside monitor for this jail, not an after-the-fact report every time someone dies.”
Bruce Calloway of the Wentworth County Legal Aid Coalition echoed that call, noting that the jail’s population has hovered near 480 inmates against a designed capacity of 412 in recent months. “You cannot staff a jail for 412 people and then run it at 480 and act surprised when something like this happens,” Calloway said.
District Attorney Vivian Ashcroft said her office has reviewed the sheriff’s findings and determined that no individual officer’s conduct rose to the level of criminal negligence, though she said the county’s staffing practices remain a matter for civil litigation and county policy, not her office. County Council Member Terrence Boudreaux said he intends to press the county board to fund additional corrections positions during the next budget cycle rather than wait for the outcome of the family’s lawsuit.
Sheriff Pruitt said the department has already begun recruiting for eight additional corrections officer positions and is reviewing whether to cap the jail’s population at a lower threshold when staffing falls short, a step Whitmore said would likely require transferring inmates to neighboring counties on a temporary basis. “We would rather have an uncomfortable conversation about capacity today than have this conversation again,” Pruitt said.
The family’s attorney said a wrongful-death claim is expected to be filed within the month. Boudreaux said he plans to invite Pruitt and Whitmore to testify before the county board’s public safety committee once the claim is filed, calling the case “a test of whether this county actually changes anything or just writes a better report next time.”
The report also recommended that the jail install an electronic alert system that would automatically escalate any unanswered medical request after 10 minutes, a fix Whitmore said the department has already budgeted for but does not expect to have installed for at least three months due to a backlog with the vendor. Pruitt said the county board has agreed to expedite the purchase given the circumstances.
Fontaine said she plans to raise the findings with judges handling other pending cases involving clients held at the jail, arguing that the report should inform bail and pretrial-release decisions for defendants with documented substance-use disorders. “If the county can’t guarantee a safe withdrawal process inside that jail, judges need to weigh that when they decide who stays and who doesn’t,” she said.