A St. Louis man who last year was shot six times by police is now languishing neglected in city jail, his family said in court today.
"No family should have to live like this," said Caitlin O'Shaughnessy, whose brother Kevin has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been in the City Justice Center since June.
She says that during his six months in jail he hasn't had access to clean clothes, has gone without a shower and brushing his teeth for months, and has not had his hand bandages changed. Caitlin and her brother's attorney, Jordan Cohen, shared with the media a photo of O’Shaughnessy in the city jail with an untreated hernia that had swelled to the size of a cantaloupe.
O’Shaughnessy, 31, entered the city jail after what Cohen says was an attempt to commit suicide by cop.
In April, O’Shaughnessy was at a house in the Ellendale neighborhood when police say he brandished a rifle and began threatening a man and a woman in the house with him. The man grabbed an ax in self-defense, and O’Shaughnessy went downstairs and fired a shot up through the first floor. The two others in the house then fled.
When a SWAT team arrived, O'Shaughnessy pointed the rifle from a second story window. Police opened fire, hitting O'Shaughnessy six times, including once in the head. He fell from the window to the ground, suffering multiple wounds and a traumatic brain injury.
He is charged with multiple counts of assault and armed criminal action. Police say he also tried to burn the house down.
In June, after leaving the hospital, he was booked in the city jail.
There, his family told St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Katherine Fowler at a bond hearing today, he has been medically neglected. They said that the jail lost his wheelchair and failed to administer antibiotics.
At one point, O'Shaughnessy developed a hernia, minor at first, but it went untreated until it was cantaloupe size "or larger." An attorney who took a photo of the untreated hernia later had his phone privileges at the jail revoked for doing so, the family said.
"How did that go unnoticed?" Caitlin said of the sizable protrusion.
O'Shaughnessy did eventually get hernia surgery, but his family says that was only because they raised a fuss with jail administration about it.
Caitlin and mother Susan pleaded with Fowler to allow O'Shaughnessy to be released. They asked he be allowed on home detention or, failing that, to be anywhere other than the city jail.
But Fowler was uneager to release O'Shaughnessy to his family. "I'm deeply concerned he'll be a threat to himself," she said, referring to his previous attempt to end his own life via the police.
After deliberating on the matter for a few moments, Fowler ordered O'Shaughnessy transferred to BJC Hospital. He will be evaluated to determine whether or not he is fit for incarceration at the city jail and, if not, where he can reside as he awaits trial. Fowler mentioned both St. Louis County Jail and the jail in St. Charles as possible alternatives.
Susan O'Shaughnessy, Kevin's mother, tells the RFT that she knows her son isn't the only one whose medical needs aren't being met in the jail. When she has visited him in the medical unit in the past, she says she's seen other detainees banging on the glass of the infirmary, trying to get someone to pay attention.
Leaving the hearing, Susan wondered aloud why the jail calls it "the infirmary" if there's no medical care to be had there.
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