For three days last year, as the outside temperature reached 90 degrees, Bryan Harris was deprived of drinking water.
Harris, who’d been locked up in the San Juan County Adult Detention Center on drug charges, had complained for months about persistent stomach pain. The medicine prescribed by the jail’s medical staff wasn’t helping and no one seemed to listen. So finally, one Monday in September, he declared a hunger strike, hoping that would get someone’s attention.
The response was almost immediate: Jail authorities turned off the tap in his cell and deprived him of water for the next three days.
“I almost lost my mind,” said Harris, recalling how he fought the urge to get on his knees and lap the water in his toilet bowl. “They said, ‘You’re on water restriction.’ I said, ‘What the hell’s water restriction?’”
On Friday, Sept. 15, four days after his tap went dry, a detective with the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office responded to Harris’s call for a police investigation. The detective’s report was uncategorical: It confirmed that water was being withheld from the inmate; no one — neither guards nor nurses — denied it.
Later that same day, Harris was taken to the local emergency room for severe dehydration. He has since retained attorney Mallory Gagan of the New Mexico Prison and Jail Project and filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, alleging that the jail staff violated his constitutional rights and were “deliberately indifferent” to the risks of withholding his water.
“Any lay person would know that a human being can die in a matter of days without water,” the lawsuit argued. “Any medical or corrections professional would know this.”
‘If I die, these are the reasons’
According to the sheriff’s report, the shut-off was instigated by Tiffany Ansley, a traveling nurse then employed by Wellpath, the nation’s largest for-profit health care provider for prisons and jails. Wellpath sent her to work inside the jail in Farmington over a six-day period in September.
Searchlight New Mexico spoke with Ansley, who has since moved to Houston, where she continues to work in correctional health care. She said it was not her intention for Harris to go without water. She said it is standard practice in correctional health care to turn off an inmate’s spout during a hunger strike, so the prisoner doesn’t gorge on water and run the risk of “fluid overload.” That problem can lead to collapse and require rehydration with an intravenous line.
Medical studies acknowledge the risks of “ fluid overload” and “ refeeding syndrome” in patients on a hunger strike. However, these same studies also note that medical staff should “carefully and gradually” administer fluids to someone on a hunger strike — not withhold water from them altogether.
“When I asked about the water being shut off, no one questioned or asked, you know, ‘Why are we shutting the water off?’” Ansley recalled. “I just thought that we were going down a checklist of things that were supposed to happen to declare a hunger strike. And so I left. I think that was on a Monday night. I came in and worked a partial shift on Tuesday night, and again, he wasn’t my patient, so I never followed up.”
The human body can go weeks without food, but only a matter of days with no water. The first symptoms are dry, cracked lips, followed by intense headaches, dizzy spells, confusion and cramps. More than a few days without water “inevitably leads to death,” according to the National Institutes of Health.
Detectives found a piece of paper in Harris’s cell with handwritten notes describing his experience over those 72 hours. “If I die,” he scrawled, “these are the reasons.”
Jail Administrator Daniel Webb declined to speak to Searchlight for this story. San Juan County Commission Chair John Beckstead said he hadn’t “heard anything” about the situation and that he would “look into” it.
One jail guard, Sgt. Crystal Vicente, told the detective that she was following instructions when she shut off Hariss’s tap. The traveling nurse “told me that he didn’t need water due to being on a hunger strike,” Vicente reported. “It would beat the purpose of being on a hunger strike if he is drinking water.”
Without informing her supervisor, Vicente immediately shut off Harris’s tap, his lawsuit asserts. She neglected to inform the guards on the next shift that they would need to bring him water, the suit alleges.
1,000 federal lawsuits against Wellpath
Conditions in the San Juan County jail have been the subject of at least a dozen lawsuits in the last four years. The suits allege wrongful deaths, civil rights violations and woefully inadequate medical care. One lawsuit filed in May by an inmate with a traumatic brain injury alleges that jail staff refused to give him his medication, leading to seizures. In another, filed in 2020, an inmate alleges that he was kept in a “dry cell” — a cell with no sink or toilet — for 12 days and was “barely allowed any water to drink.”
The question at the heart of this latest lawsuit — as laid out in sheriff’s reports and federal court documents — is how a one-off comment by an itinerant nurse could have resulted in such deplorable treatment.
Harris, as Ansley herself recalled, was not even one of her patients. She said she was working in the facility when she overheard jail staff discussing an inmate who had gone on a hunger strike. She recalled asking if his water had been turned off — without stipulating that his fluids should be closely monitored.
When police interviewed the jail guards and nurses, they corroborated Ansley’s account. One nurse said she offered Harris water three times in those days. However, detectives found a food log that supported Harris’s claims that he received just one half-cup of water during that time.
In a written statement, Ansley’s former employer, Wellpath, denied the accusation.
“Wellpath and our staff do not deny incarcerated individuals drinking water,” Chris Hartline, a company spokesman, wrote in an email to Searchlight. “Patients on a hunger strike are offered water throughout the day. Wellpath always puts patients at the center of everything we do and abides by rigorous and thorough industry standards.”
Wellpath has been the target of more than 1,000 federal lawsuits, three recent U.S. Department of Justice investigations and four FBI investigations.
In Massachusetts, the DOJ found in a 2020 investigation, there was “reasonable cause” to believe that Wellpath’s mental health care practices in the state’s prisons “violate the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” which guarantees protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
A 2021 investigation by the DOJ into the San Luis Obispo County Jail in California described a wider array of violations, finding “reasonable cause to believe” that Wellpath’s medical care contributed to violations of the Eighth Amendment; the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection and due process; and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, for its part, said it is no longer investigating the Harris incident. In its incident report, the office labeled the investigation “inactive,” appearing to characterize the event as an unfortunate mistake. A “thorough investigation” led police to conclude that the medical staff “were acting according to their medical training,” and that jail guards simply “did not notify the proper chain of command.”
“I have ruled out any criminal intent related to Detainee Harris’s water being shut off,” the detective’s report read. “This case will be considered inactive.”
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Excellent article on a very concerning topic. I had no knowledge about Wellpath and their record of abuses until now.
Thank you
I can’t be certain but the 2020 incident you cite of civil rights violations at the SJCADC may be in reference to my son who was detained there for over three weeks while in the throes of a grave psychiatric emergency on charges that were finally dismissed. The details of his unprovoked beatings and restraints while in their custody, the inept medical and psychiatric treatment, the culture of indifference towards basic human rights, and leadership’s disdain for even pre-adjudicated inmates is both storied and well-outlined in our own court transcripts.
A New Mexico jury found negligence on the part of the health-care provider, but machinations and manipulations by defense lawyers and what I suspect (not without evidence) were other very curious schemes by powerful players, resulted in no penalties for the jail or county. What saddens me most from these and our experiences is how little accountability and humanity we ask from those who work within our justice system. In a void like that, others quickly become criminals themselves, or worse, they become ruthless oppressors who view justice through the lens of cruelty and humans as objects to be controlled and demeaned. Even the “healers” in these places become heartless minions who can’t even see for themselves when a man is dying from thirst! What kind of world is this anyway!???