On April 20, Keaton Farris was arrested for failing to appear at a hearing for passing a bad check. He had no previous record.
At the time of his arrest he told a Lynnwood police officer: “I’m off my meds and I’m pretty anxious right now but your badge is calming me down.” Seventeen days later he was dead.
The treatment he received at the hands of officers who are sworn to protect the people they serve was horrendous. He was kept in isolation, stripped of his clothes other than a suicide smock, tasered, shackled to a restraint chair for hours on end, not given access to water, “taken to the ground” multiple times, denied even the most basic medical treatment, his medication lost and visits by his family denied. He died alone in his cell at the Island County Jail and was found by a jailer hours later who didn’t even have the decency to open the cell door to see if he was OK. Instead he poked a baton through a slot to see if Keaton was alive.
It is mind-boggling how many people were involved with Keaton Farris in a very short period of time and how they piled on abuse after abuse until he died. Now it appears Island County Sheriff Mark Brown is taking some action, although it’s hard to fathom how he and his predecessor missed the inept and dangerous leadership of Dennis De at the Island County Jail. The administration for Snohomish, Skagit and San Juan Counties must be held accountable as well; they all had a hand in this horrible situation.
The treatment Keaton received at Island County Jail has happened there before, but this time things got so carried away someone died. De Dennis (the now former jail administrator) and his subordinates habitually had vulnerable inmates stripped naked and provided with only a “suicide smock,” put into an unheated, unfurnished room called the Behavior Modification Module and isolated for days on end. They proclaimed all this was for the safety of the persons involved even when people were not self-harming or suicidal. This took place under at least two administrations and no one called Dennis out on this inhumane and degrading treatment of people.
Keaton was denied the most basic needs to stay alive. The jailers on duty and their supervisors are all culpable in Keaton’s death. The least of their punishments should be to spend a week in their own Behavior Modification Module in just a suicide smock and given a couple dixie cups of water a day. After that’s done, they need to be put on trial for murder, because that is what happened here. This was not a simple matter of broken processes. If you deny the means for a person to stay alive until they die, how can that be called anything but murder?
If you want to help keep what happened from happening again and have the people involved be held accountable — here are some things you can do:
Read the investigative report released by the Sheriff’s Office here:http://www.islandcounty.net/sheriff/documents/InvestigativeReport.pdf
Post the report and your comments to your social media feeds.
Write an email or letter to news agencies.
Ask what Snohomish, Skagit and San Juan Counties are doing to ensure what happened to Keaton never happens again.
Contact your representatives to take action on the local and national level.
Contact ACLU and Amnesty International.
Join the National Alliance on Mental Illness or Amnesty International.
Julie O’Brien is a resident of Clinton.
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