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'Avoidable?' New Orleans woman's death in jail cell raises questions about care in final hours

The Advocate - 5/31/2018

May 31--Kentrell Hurst already had a drug problem when she told New Orleans police that a stranger kidnapped and raped her on a St. Roch street two years ago. But the mother of five seemed to lose herself after that morning, her brother said.

"She just really didn't care after that. Because she felt like she was violated," Kendall Jones said.

Hurst, 36, died while detoxing in the New Orleans jail on Sunday, the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office confirmed Wednesday. Although an autopsy was performed Tuesday, the coroner has yet to make an official determination on her cause of death.

Her death, the first in more than five months at the New Orleans jail after a spate of six deaths last year, again raises questions about the quality of health care for inmates, many of whom struggle with substance abuse problems.

Hurst was arrested Friday afternoon when employees at a Rouses Market in Gentilly accused her of shoplifting $57 worth of goods. She also had pending municipal charges for battery and theft.

She was eligible for release on her own recognizance on the theft charges under a municipal ordinance passed last year. But she was awaiting a May 29 court date to have her bail set on the battery count, said Blake Arcuri, the general counsel for the Sheriff's Office.

While Hurst was being booked into the jail, she reported that she had been a daily user of heroin and alcohol for years, and that she had used heroin on the day of her arrest, the Sheriff's Office said. She was placed on a special detoxification protocol that is supposed to provide new inmates with medication and extra attention.

Officials said she refused a dose of an unspecified medication at about 6:45 p.m. Sunday and was found unresponsive in her cell, which she shared with another inmate, about 9 p.m. Although staff members tried to revive her, she was pronounced dead at the jail.

Hurst is the first woman to die in the lockup since 2009, according to a list of jail deaths maintained by Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University.

Jones said his family was told that Hurst spent Saturday night, the night before her death, vomiting in her cell.

An attorney representing inmates at the jail questioned why she died while she was supposed to be kept under close watch.

"Kentrell's death was avoidable," said Emily Washington, of the MacArthur Justice Center in New Orleans. "Providing appropriate care for persons in need of detox treatment is well-known, standard corrections practice. But once again, the medical and security staff in the jail have shown indifference to the safety and health of people in their care. Kentrell was visibly sick. The severity of her condition was ignored."

Hurst's death follows that of another inmate who was on the jail's detox protocol, 41-year-old Dennis Edwards, who was being held in lieu of $4,500 bail on theft and other counts in December. The Coroner's Office determined that he died of natural causes from hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

A nurse for the jail's health contractor later alleged in a lawsuit that officials ignored her advice to send Edwards to a hospital.

On Wednesday, Jones and family members were making funeral arrangements and trying to find out what they could about Hurst's death. Jones said he has heard a series of conflicting secondhand stories so far, and that it could be months before the coroner makes a determination.

Jones said his suspicions were raised by the lag of several hours between his sister's death and the first call he received.

"I'm getting three different stories, and it's not adding up," he said. "Why didn't we get a phone call until like 3:30 in the morning if they wasn't trying to cover up something?"

Jones said his sister, the youngest of three siblings, used to style hair before she began using drugs. She loved to visit the French Quarter and surprised him with her kindness, he said.

On one occasion, Hurst told Jones that she had a gift for him. It was a palm tree, which he planted in his front yard.

But in recent years Hurst's life was dominated by the fallout from the incident in St. Roch in the early morning hours of Nov. 30, 2016.

Hurst said she was walking to a relative's house to pick up a school uniform for one of her children when a man drove past her in an SUV and leered at her. Then he got out of the vehicle, pulled her into an alley on Florida Avenue and raped her, she said.

Hurst went to police the same night and underwent a sexual assault examination. DNA linked her report to a man named Seandell Kelly.

Kelly's trial last month centered as much on Hurst as on him.

As Hurst acknowledged on the stand, she was not happy to be a witness.

"She didn't know this dude, and whoever the dude's people is, she didn't know them either," Jones said. "I told her, 'You need to do that so you can have some peace with yourself.' "

Kelly's defense attorneys repeatedly questioned Hurst about her drug and alcohol use. Hurst also watched as both the prosecution and the defense played a high-definition video of the incident to the jury and asked her to narrate what was happening.

"It's working on my nerves. I'm ready to go," Hurst said at one point.

Shortly after that, Hurst bolted from the courtroom. It took a group of police and prosecutors, who formed a wall around her in a courthouse hallway, to force her back onto the stand.

The defense team suggested that Hurst had engaged in consensual sex for money. They said that a portion of the video where Kelly pummeled Hurst was a dispute over cash.

Kelly was convicted of second-degree kidnapping on April 26, but the jury deadlocked on a charge of aggravated rape. The District Attorney's Office intends to retry him on the latter charge, which could have meant another appearance on the stand for Hurst.

A spokesman for the DA's Office said prosecutors still plan to retry Kelly. Ken Daley said prosecutors will rely on the video surveillance, which is graphic.

As Hurst increasingly turned to drugs over the past two years, Jones said that he often spoke with his sister about giving them up.

"She was dealing with her issues for the last few years. It was kind of hard for her to keep a job," he said.

"We had a lot of conversations. We had a lot of fallouts. I loved her, and I didn't agree to the things that she was doing," Jones said. "I pretty much kept asking her and kept asking her, 'Sis, when's it going to be over?' "

Jones said it did not surprise him to hear that his sister had been arrested for shoplifting. He suspects she was hoping to use the proceeds to buy more drugs.

But he added that no one should forget about the people who get arrested.

"They still are human beings," he said.

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